I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat; it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.

You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.

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.

[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.