The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.
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.
Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world.
I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.
Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.
None of us seem to think that we should draw a line under what would be a satisfactory amount of wealth.
America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions – that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self.
At the time I was taught to read, it was an Eden-like time of my life. My mother adored me. Everyone adored me. So I associate reading with enormous pleasure.
I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It’s not spontaneous and it doesn’t have a schedule.
I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person’s life.
I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.
A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be.
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 this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.
People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.
I think a woman is powerless if she cannot freely claim the right to her reproductive capacity. Society can talk about anything it likes, except a woman’s reproductive existence.
When I’m writing, I think about the garden, and when I’m in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.
The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they’re not.
What I don’t write is as important as what I write.
I didn’t know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn’t afraid to fail.
I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance.