I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read 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.

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

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

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

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

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

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.

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?

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

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.