What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?

It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't try to write through it, to force it. Many do, but that won't work. Just wait, it will come.

I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.

An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.