It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.

It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

you got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.

Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.

I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.