The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color - light, black, in-between - as the marker for race is really an error.

I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?

The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.

It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.

Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.

Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.