We would not have been a successful family without my father and stepfather, who were working-class men with better dreams for their children. We just wore them out.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.

I'm trying to get Americans to see that we're all pretty much the same. I believe it; I was taught God doesn't have a color. I want to better the planet a little bit.

It would be nice if we redefined what we meant by 'war story.' If you're making $15,000 a year living in a certain area of Portland, trying to make it with three kids and no husband, that's a kind of war.

When my mother left home, her family sat shivah for her, more because my father was not Jewish than because he was black.