Beginning 'Beloved' with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city.

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?

I don't do the things other people call "play."

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.