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" Eminem was someone that I discovered I liked, largely because of his relationship to language and to his mother. "

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" People have a copyright on their own life. "

" Nothing is more flattering for a writer than when someone knows your work. "

" One of the things that's great about writing for a magazine is that every week you get to be a different person. You're writing different things all the time and not slogging along for years on something. "

" I think that you don't really want to write a book that doesn't really move people and doesn't get them to think. "

" American musicals are, for the most part, about boys, or boyish pursuits and aspirations - the fantasy of freedom and resolve - and those dreams have little to do with the reality of most black women's lives. "

" I think, what's the point of writing a book that you would get in one sitting? "

" Racism seduces us with its desire to categorize, shutting out the living and breathing and 'different' world all around us. "

" I love Andre Leon Talley as a person. "

" I love writing. Writing has been very good to me. "

" In the contemporary world, artists are almost entirely self-referential. "

" Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals. "

" I think what we're attracted to on the page is something that is very difficult to do in life, which is to examine in what seems like a moment. To examine what we can't do in life very well, which is to be as present and accountable to what an experience is. That's why life is short and art is very long. "

" I think that Tyler Perry's genius really has been to tap into the domestic market. He knows what his audience is based on, having toured America for so long, and then giving them the blueprint for his films prior to the films coming out, and then the films have the built-in audience because they've seen it in theaters already. "

" I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it's true or false. "

" Dramas about addiction can be exciting to watch. And then dispiriting. Exciting because degradation is fascinating to follow from the relative safety and smugness of an 'appropriate' life, and dispiriting because if all that sad mayhem can happen to this or that character, what's to keep it from happening to me or you? "

" There is not enough time for anything, ever. "

" I'm attracted to people who work their little plot of land and cultivate it and cultivate it. "

" I suppose that there are many novels that are set during the summer because it's a lonely time of year. Friends come and go, comfort comes and goes, which makes it a perfect time of year to indulge in melancholia. "

" If you want to take writing on, you should pay writing the respect it deserves, which is to say, reading it. "

" I grew up in a largely black community during the '70s and '80s that scoffed at 'white' music. That music - folk, rock, some disco - was considered soulless, aberrant, just one more example of the Caucasian's desire to scream and yell and demand whatever their privilege and perpetual adolescence dictated they should demand. "

" I think I'm just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure. "

" What I feel is there are certain demands that you have to satisfy in any piece of writing. When it's just for me, it's just for me, but if it's a piece for a particular publication, I know what they're going to ask for. "

" It's dollars before art in Hollywood. "

" For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like. "

" In general, what we really want is a feeling when we read anything that the author has explored the territory as dutifully and as thoroughly as their spirit allows and as their heart allows. "

" If I feel like I haven't really tapped into the essence of the story when I do an assignment, I may revisit it on my own, and that's when I feel freer to add my imagination. But I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy. "

" I never feel like I've done anything. Swear to God. I'm not kidding. So it's always a surprise when somebody asks me to do anything. "

" If you have a word of encouragement, you can do anything. "

" I didn't like '12 Years a Slave' because it was playing to the Spielbergian model of redemption. "

" I used to think that the feeling of alienation that I would have was just me, but I realise that it's also a symptom of the modern world. "