"A writer's life is not about writing. It's about living."

"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs, you have the privilege of not being a slave.'"

"I'm writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was writing for Russians, not for a little white island in the Caribbean."

"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power."

"I'm a black writer. I'm not a writer who happens to be black."