Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.
I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway.
Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It’s truly unbelievable.
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don’t mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.
There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.
He wants to put his story next to hers.
I don’t believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that’s what an artist is-a politician.
Birth, life, and death – each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.
And wouldn’t you know he’d be a singing man.
I don’t wait to be struck by lightning and I don’t need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.
We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.
A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that’s somebody.
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event.
You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.