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

We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.

I thought the whole world was like Lorain.

How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book - that for me is what literature does.