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?
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.