When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.