Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.

Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book - that for me is what literature does.

If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.

When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle.