They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations...
Lonely was much better than alone.
Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.
If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren’t my children.
A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.
The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.
In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it’s nothing else but color.
The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
It’s been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it’s about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.
Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources.
If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.
Beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city.
I don’t think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they’re black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about.
The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?