“I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don’t do anything with it, you lose it.”

“[Imperialism] allowed people to break away from shackling old traditions and heritages. It introduced the world to fresh ideas and new opportunities. These are the contributions that matter for the…

“Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh. I don’t think there’s any consecutive moral philosophy in fiction beyond excellence.”

“Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. That role is assigned to us and never removed.”

“My guess would be that our folly lies not in what threatens us, or even what eludes us, but in our inability to adapt to it.”

“Writers are what the priest has been throughout history, this person we pay to talk about spirituality.”

“I didn't set out to be a troublesome writer, but if that's what I've been, I am totally unrepentant.”

“Once you're into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.”

“I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don’t do anything with it, you lose it.”

“I don’t think one really gets permission to do things. You do them because you have to do them, and nothing else will do.”

“There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.”

“I recall lying on a bed, looking at a manuscript on the floor as I reached to turn pages, and thinking to myself, I must mean everything I say, every word.”

“You live one life of invention and another in reality. As the first grows, the second shrinks—there’s no way around it.”

“I don’t see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.”

“Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. That role is assigned to us and never removed.”

“I told myself, Thank goodness those poets proclaimed Black is beautiful, because now I can talk about how Black is everything.”

“It puzzles me that people say my work is difficult. If you read it, it’s very simple.”

“I think that if humans are still walking around in fifty years, and still reading fiction, my work will last that long. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

“I’m pretty interested in general knowledge, and science and arcane knowledge. Much more interested in that than I am in Literature with a capital L. Or at least as interested.”

“I write to find out what I think about something.”

“I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit.”

“I write plays that are architecturally sound but packed with unexpected things.”

“Literature is a mirror with the capacity, like some clocks, to run ahead of time.”

“I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit.”

“Before the film is finished, I have to be able to put into words why I have selected each shot and the meaning I attach to the order of the sequences.”

“I think it shows in the poems that the author didn’t ask ­permission of the parents to publish them.”

“I think that if humans are still walking around in fifty years, and still reading fiction, my work will last that long. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

“I love immersing myself in the universe of a novel for years. There is never a time when I am more alive.”

“The institution of slavery is a stain on this nation's soul which will never be cleansed . . . There's a second sin that's almost as great, and that's emancipation.”

“I know some people downtown assumed I was just a party girl, but I did get up early each morning.”

“Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Be better than yourself.”

“The real event of the 1980s was . . . the emergence of great looting fortunes . . . which made us revise the value of everything—not to the benefit of society . . . ”

“The foregrounding of artifice—dwelling on the making of the poem, in a poem—seems to go to the core of what poetry is, doesn’t it?”

"It’s because you’re always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way."

“Before you have the assumptions implicit in the first sentence, anything could happen. But once you have that sentence, you’ve narrowed your options down to a point where there really isn’t that…

On having his testimony discounted in court: “How can a poet or fiction writer tell the truth in court if he or she can't present the events in a meaningful sequence, which is what a story is? The…

“Writers had better not be too cocksure that they’ve got inspiration on their side.”

“I think of America as my audience, and inside that space are white people as well as people of color.”

“Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Be better than yourself.”

“I recall lying on a bed, looking at a manuscript on the floor as I reached to turn pages, and thinking to myself, I must mean everything I say, every word.”

“On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.”

September 18, 2026 – “When holes appeared in my underwear, I knew that I had a case of moths.”

September 16, 2026 – “Lately, though, I have become fascinated by the so-called big bands on the SiriusXM station called ‘40s Junction.’ ”

“All writing, for me, is a relationship. I don’t feel like I can do whatever I want with whomever I want. It’s call-and-response.”

On her refusal to publish with Virago Press: “I did not want to be published by them because they publish only women. It reminds one of ladies' compartments in nineteenth-century trains . . . ”

“Literature is pleasure and knowledge, like sex. It’s useful only so long as one doesn’t set out to make it useful.”

“Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”

“A fatal question—what are people reading these days? Never mind what people are reading these days. What should I be writing about is the fundamental question.”