As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself.
Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.
I always know the ending; that’s where I start.
Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don’t get nothing for it.
The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.
I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.
What I’m doing ain’t about hating White people. It’s about loving us.
You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there’s nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.
A bestseller is a book that non-book buyers buy.
I’m just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.
The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.
The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?
All important things are hard.
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilitie s; it’s choosing the ones you want.
When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.
Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.