"I don't belong to anybody. I don't belong to any group. I belong to myself."

"I’m not a politician. I’m a writer."

"I'm writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was writing for Russians, not for a little white island in the Caribbean."

"When you get to be my age, you realize that people are not all that different."

"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power."