I wasn't born to a wealthy or powerful family - mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx.

I know who my dad is, I've met him a few times, but I don't even call him dad. I know it sounds horrible, but I don't even see him as part of my family, to be honest. If you want the truth, it doesn't...

A lot of people think I'm that guy in 'Betsy's Wedding', but I'm not. What it is for me is that, on some level, I connect with the character emotionally.

My mom's one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

Whenever I think of my birthplace, Walton-on-Thames, my reference first and foremost is the river. I love the smell of the river; love its history, its gentleness. I was aware of its presence from my...

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

We aren't cool and never will be.

Or maybe they weren't changing. Maybe they were just now becoming what they had always wanted to be.

What makes you think that people with other types of clothes are special? I can go to the shop, buy such clothes, and what? Now I am important?

"I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then...

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no...

I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact.

But years and miles away from home could never attenuate the city's hold on my identity, and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to...

I think life becomes a fabric of choices, interwoven, all related... I split my life into these two things, thief and lady

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no...

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody's memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory,...

She had a sense of longing and loss that she had never had before. It was as if her family history had been erased and they'd been left unmemorable. She imagined that Rachel's family must have similar...

In the words he's free, on the page he can be anything. A hero.

I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. I no longer want to believe that...

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

Our privileges are the things not within our own control that push us forward and move us ahead from that starting line. Acknowledging them does not mean you are admitting to doing something to...

"You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.' 'We can't both be Alexander.' 'Well sometimes I think you're two sides of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between.'"

Life consists of many different stories. A person has not just one but countless life stories that weave in between each other and together create exactly that specific life and that specific human...

We can't help the way we're born. We can't help what we are, only what life we choose to make for ourselves.

When you open to me and I open to you, when we immerse you into me and I into you, when we lose you in me and I in you, Only then am I me and you are you.

"I'm Razo, a member of Bayern's Own," he said, stopping himself from adding "Loafing is just a hobby of mine." "Bayern's Own? But you're a child." Razo looked up to the sky. "I'm not a child, I'm just...

You don't know what you are.

Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the...

I'm a liar. And I can't stop thinking about boys.