“Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.”

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.

There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.

I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and left me unfed? Who has seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken?

Father asked us what was God’s noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are.

A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi… has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em.

My look and my character come from my experiences as a child. I wasn’t allowed to have girl toys, and I grew up poor. I also had a rough relationship with my stepdad.

Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it.

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.

I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how to handle babies.