Evil is not interesting. What is it, chopping off someone's head? We used to do that as kids, you know, you tear up paper dolls and stuff. I know everyone's done it in the history of the world, but maybe everybody was dumb and they were just looking for something interesting to do. What's really interesting and hard is being good.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

I think there's data, and then there's information that comes from data, and then there's knowledge that comes from information. And then, after knowledge, there is wisdom. I am interested in how to get from data to wisdom.

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.

Word-work is sublime... because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference-the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.