The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing. Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it.

I don't do the things other people call "play."

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.

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.

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

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.