I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

I don't do the things other people call "play."

you got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

The Administration of the United States is such dread I almost feel paralyzed.

All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you." Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soared for six years.

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