“To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.”

“A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.”

“Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?”

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.”

“All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.”

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"… No woman has ever written enough.”

“For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.”

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things only because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

“Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.”

“A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.”