It was important, I know, for my father as a product of his times not to be vulnerable, so he chose, and I can't say that I blame him, to live his life rather than create it.

My mother used to do all the things that were important to her after midnight. ... Sometimes I'd sneak downstairs and see her knitting, or reading, or writing letters. I'd think of her as a thief, stealing the tail end of the day, the hours nobody else wanted or used.

Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession ain't solution, however, because reading even at its most intense and verisimilitudinous is vicarious, and once you close the book you're off the hook.

Racism is a virus. And since nobody's really looking too hard for a cure it reproduces itself over and over again.

The symbiotic relationship between reading and writing is a cornerstone of our individual intellectual journey and our educational system. We write as an act of self-expression. We read because language renders unto us the vitality of real and imagined experience.

I quickly learned that motherhood was a high wire act sometimes performed without a net.