When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend__ sisters,I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.

Writing should beguile us, not just take us from A to B to Zzzzz

I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood.

She missed -- without knowing what she missed-- paints and crayons