I wanted to write about voodoo tradition that I feel has been very important to survival of black people here: people of the African diaspora, people of this region, and throughout the south.

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.

While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.

I wanted to be my own heroine.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

I think that I'm trying to hopefully change my children's ideas about what is possible, and about what is possible for them.

There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

Beauty is the attractive power of perfection.

In London November isn't a month, it's a state of mind.

A man is worked on by what he works on.

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

Not careers alone make people happy. A successful professional life and joy in work are certainly a part of it, but I couldn't be happy without a fulfilling private life.

I am a complete sentimentalist when it comes to clothes. I have so many memories attached to them that I can't throw them out - I don't know where to put everything.