All art is knowing when to stop.

Let your face speak what's in your heart. When my kids walk in the room my face says I'm glad to see them.

There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever.

We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us.

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.

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.