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

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

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

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.

That one doesn’t count. The poor scoundrel is deaf, but he makes a fine sniffer. How do you think we found you?

She didn't like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she'd been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

There's never any great risk as long as you have money.

You're not looking for the Rolls Royce and the big fancy trailer. Those are supposed to be the byproducts of having fun and then getting good at what you do.

People have interesting things to say and you're only going to learn from different people's experience and knowledge.

I know a lot of celebrity types go for Kabbalah and Scientology. But why pay 10 per cent of your earnings to someone when it's all common sense: treat others as you'd like to be treated yourself.

Seek first the Kingdom of God: that is, the first order of business is to transform one's own inner life, not the accumulation of external trappings of speculative knowledge.

Objects do not have meaning. But if an object is thoughtful we project meaning onto it in daily life.

Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.

The aristocrats and bureaucrats are dirty rats.