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" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I like marriage. The idea. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book. "

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

" 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. "

" Make a difference about something other than yourselves. "

Make A Difference

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people. "