I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.
There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.
From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.
I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.
Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.
I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.
It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.
Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.
From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.
Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.
Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.
The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.
If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.
My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.
Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.
