I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is-a politician.

...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.