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" If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. "

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" Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. "

" Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are. "

" 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. "

" Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth. "

" 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. "

" My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children. "

" 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. "

" 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 wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it. "

" If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write 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. "

" Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war. "

" 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? "

" I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway. "

" All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. "

" Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all. "

" I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people. "

" 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. "

" Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers. "

" 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. "

" When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same. "

" We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. "

" I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons. "

" I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate. "

" At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. "

" I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man. "

" No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything. "