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

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" For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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