Of course I'm a black writer... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.

It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.