We all think we're different, but when it comes around, we end up needing the same things. Somebody to love us. Somebody to respect us.

The movie is more real in so many ways than the life I am leading. No, that’s not true. I just desperately wish this was only a movie.

I write in a small office at home.

Each of us is born with a history already in place

Everything in life is made up...You make up that you are happy. You make up that you are sad. You make up that you are in love. If you don't make up your own life, who's going to make it up for you? It's bad enough when you die and everybody can make up their own stories about you. —Mr. Hooft

The idea of voluntary segregation went against every value I had been taught. What did being born black have to do with excellence?

I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.