Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.

Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.