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

Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

He said, 'Always. Always.

All the books that were being published by African-American guys were saying 'screw whitey', or some variation of that. Not the scholars but the pop books. And the other thing they said was, 'You have to confront the oppressor.' I understand that. But you don't have to look at the world through his eyes. I'm not a stereotype; I'm not somebody else's version of who I am. And so when people said at that time black is beautiful – yeah? Of course. Who said it wasn't? So I was trying to say, in The Bluest Eye, wait a minute. Guys. There was a time when black wasn't beautiful. And you hurt.