Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.

I am a moralist. I worry.

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays

The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.