“I write to intensify reality and at the same time to undermine it.”

“I deplored the idea that writing involves suffering, that it had to be a bloodletting. Later I found out that it would be, and maybe should be.”

“Philosophy isn’t the only way to understand things, but it’s an awfully good way.”

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

“I hate when I feel the construction of a joke. It makes me sad.”

“There’s a feminist discourse that women can't do it all. This is what many women experience, and it’s very difficult. But I am not like that.”

“I think the novel has to stay attached to life somehow. It has to share the terrain of life.”

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

“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.”

“What I really believe is that there are no minor characters in life or in art.”

 

“Underlying the famously big gap between fiction and nonfiction there’s a rather naive belief that fiction is invented—­that it’s pulled out of thin air.”

“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.”

“Unless you can say disorganization is a process, I confess I don’t have one.”

“We law professors have a certain arrogance— we think we can be experts on anything.”

“It takes one durable person to believe that fantasy is as potent as reality. Seeing too far into others’ lives can make you cynical.”

“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?”

“As long as I have music, I don’t ever feel like I’m solitary. It changes the air in the room. It’s the most consistent thing in my life.”

“It’s part of your job, as a poet, to write out of experience. To name what matters to you. You’ve only got one life to draw on.”

“If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down.”

“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.”

“Ideological critique has to end up being a critique of the self. You can’t recognize an ideology unless, in some sense, you see it in yourself.”

“A lot of things that fascinated me clearly had a lot to do with my navigating a simultaneously segregated and integrated world.”

“You have to be humble enough to accept that you’re secondary to the author, and yet have enough chutzpah to take that other language and transform it.”

“When I was a child, everything used to come to me first as a poem.”

“I suppose that my work is always mourning something, the loss of a paradise—not the thing that comes after you die, but the thing that you had before.”

“When I was in hospital in Rome, having the experience of being a paralyzed man nearly dead, my only excitement was in the thought that I could write some of this shit down.”

“I seldom know where I’m headed, but if the story is meant to be, you cross over to the other side—you’re inside it, and there’s an engine.”

“By making breath more evident, more material, more dwelled-upon, they make black breath matter, implicitly insist that black lives matter.”

“It’s best to recognize that you’re not going to write many brilliant poems. If just one stands the test of time, that’s something that justifies your existence.”

“⁠I try to pay attention when the unconscious gives me a hint.”

“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.”

“Reading beautiful books can’t be traumatizing. Seeing awful things can be⁠—but reading? I don’t believe in that at all.”

“Any time someone has suggested that the kind of book I was describing couldn’t or shouldn’t be pulled off, it’s made me think, I’ll show you.”

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

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

“This is a hard thing to say, but it’s absolutely true—when I think of the men I’ve been with, every one of them stood between me and my writing.”

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

“You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed. It’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poem has to exist.”

“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.”

“Humor doesn’t cut it, or romance, or lyricism—no, no, no. Only terror works.”

“There are moments when you run up against a white wall—there’s a white man, white man, white man, white man—and the story somehow has to be uncovered.”

“The first thing they’d say was ‘This is a nice story—where’s your novel?’ And I would just lie my head off. ‘Oh, it’s at home. It’s almost there!’”

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

“I see my writing on imagination and on war as continuous. Or rather, the two subjects are essentially locked in combat.”

“I like to have my say, obviously. And if people would have just let me talk, some of these books wouldn’t have had to be written.”

“The thing about writing novels is that it must be a form of self-suppression. You don’t matter. The page is not a mirror.”

“Just as after you give birth you rapidly forget the pain involved, you easily overlook the effort that’s gone into composing a novel once it’s complete.”

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

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

“Gĩkũyũ is the language I feel more. English is just what I’m used to now.”

“Except for my less than two years at Stony Brook, I’ve never been in any scene or community, ever.” 

“When an author is no longer working toward publication, he has the greatest freedom.”

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