I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing.
I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.
I'm sometimes afraid I'll cross a line and it'll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.
Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.
In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other.
But you know, where did the Brontes go to college? Where did George Eliot go to college? Where did Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington go? Did George Washington go to college? This idea which we now have that people ought to have these credentials is really ridiculous. Where did Homer go to college?
Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it's because I'm thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it's all coming back to writing.
the first step in claiming yourself is anger. You get mad. And you can't do anything before you get angry. And I recommend getting very angry to everyone, anyone.
You know how they say a man's house is his castle? I think for a woman, it's her body. I feel so strongly about a woman's right to choose. This is my Zionism. It's not a "right" any more than it's a right to breathe, to take in oxygen.
Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.
A piece of cloth that is called "linen" has more validity than calling you and me "black" or "negro." "Cotton" has more validity as cotton than yours and my being "black."
I'm always surprised to hear or read my work described, "In angry tones, she says." No! In truthful tones! Does truth have a tone? I don't know.
I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.
Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world.
The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.
In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong."
I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.
I don't feel I'm angry. I feel as though I'm describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called "angry." If I had an affair with my husband's best friend and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I'm not doing that.
I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.
The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.
The Holocaust happened in Europe, and that's important to how it is viewed. Had Europeans done such a thing in the far corners of the earth, rather than on their own doorstep, it might not be mentioned in the history books.
If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.
Another thing I like to say to my students is this: "How many Corinthians read Paul's letters?" The answer is none. They couldn't have cared less! There aren't even any Corinthians left, but Paul's letters persist. Paul was not a professional writer. He was called to something, and he sent his letters. That's a good way to look at it. That you might be making something that nobody cares about, but you have to do it. It's not that people should care, but that you should care.
The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.
My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.
