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

When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.

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.

In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.

...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.