For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays

A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment

Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.

Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.