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" I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it. "

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" 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. "

" As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think. "

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

" There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I like marriage. The idea. "

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

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

" There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people. "

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

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

" Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader. "

" Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us. "

" If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form. "

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

" She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind. "

" Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it. "

" 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. "

" I get angry about things, then go on and work. "

" 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. "

" It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion. "

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

" 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? "

" One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to. "

" 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. "