“If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were...”

“New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of 'golden ages' to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination ...”

“As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back ...”

“Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain ...”

“What's often not acknowledged about depression is how much anger is in it.”

“I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.”

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It aint no disgrace to be po...”

“Youve changed me forever. And Ill never forget you.”

“Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discover...”

“I think that when you are famous every weakness is exaggerated.”

“My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.”

“Only strength can cooperate. Weakness can only beg.”