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..

I'm trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it..

In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other. And the important thing isn't whether I'm angry. The more important….

It's not that I'm a very good person. It's that I think I should at least look at the ways in which I am not a good person, the ways in which I so re….

What frustrates me is to see African-Americans behave as though what European-Americans say is worthwhile. It simply isn't. It's just some silly peop….

I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes..

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's br….

Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath o….

But you know, where did the Brontes go to college? Where did George Eliot go to college? Where did Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or George Washing….

Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming ….

An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaz….

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been thr….

I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea..

Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap..

I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life..

What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her..

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them..

What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two..

That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him..