I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.

What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.