A bestseller is a book that non-book buyers buy

Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

...the change was adjustment without improvement.

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.