A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job..

when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble..

I'm very aware that we make these decisions toward love or hate every day. I certainly don't have the stamina to live through each day making only th….

The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang..

If I actually ran the world, I'd do it from the kitchen. It's not anything deliberate or a statement or anything, that's just how I understand things….

"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and theref….

It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same..

The truth we have to face about the world we live in is that it's driven by profit, and contradictions and doubts are not profitable. They yield wisd….

It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Her….

In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen t….

So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that….

In isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasures. In what shallow glimmering space ….

Children like their mothers especially to be standing still and watching them, even if they are sleeping. At least that's how I felt. There's nothing….

Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you..

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present..

I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book..

The Holocaust happened in Europe, and that's important to how it is viewed. Had Europeans done such a thing in the far corners of the earth, rather t….

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love..

Tomorrow exists even though I may not exist in it..