If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.

I like marriage. The idea.

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.