The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

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.

One of the monstrous things that slavery in this country caused was the breakup of families. I mean, physical labor, horrible; beatings, horrible; lynching death, all of that, horrible. But the living life of a parent who, A, has no control over what happens to your children, none. They don't belong to you. You may not even nurse them. They may be shipped off somewhere, as in "Beloved" the mother was, to be nursed by somebody who was not able to work in the fields and was a wet nurse.