I'm a black writer from Mississippi. That's what I most consider myself.

I'm not good enough as a person and definitely not good enough as a writer.

I'm also, than anything else, a teacher and a student. And without the four hours, I'm pretty monsterish. For real.

Black is not a vice. Nor is segregation a virtue.

I'm an obsessive writer who needs and loves revision. Writing helps me learn and helps me teach.

I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.

I'm interested in how the confessional is so abrasively critiqued today. I'm not really comfortable with simply confessing but I do think "confessing" is a major part of reckoning.

Long Division has a lot of Afrosurrealist impulses. I think the book was more Afrofuturist when it was like 700 pages.

We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.

Obama will win. We will win. Then we will continue to lose. And the right questions will never be honestly asked or answered, and it's all just too much.

Your letter reminds me that any love that necessitates deception is not love. It doesn't matter if that supposed love is institutional or personal.

I really don't think it's a case of not caring at all about animals. Instead, I think it's a case of caring so much about one's own self that everything else becomes immaterial.

Introversion at least if extreme is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.

It's funny how God will change your plans for you when he's ready.

I don't mind 800 million Chinese drinking a bottle [of Coca-Cola] a day, but I don't want them to bring back the empties.

I have to say, early on, to be fair, in the [Barack] Obama administration, the Obama White House said that Fox News was not a true news organization.

I think women are scared of feeling powerful and strong and brave sometimes.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

Music is the key to the female heart.

For what is prayer but the expansion of your self into the living ether?

So most of the time when we are confronted by more, rather than a few, choices we're often novices and so we don't really know how to differentiate these various options.