Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.

Being able to laugh got me through.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.