It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?

In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.