“Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.”

I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.

Artists are here to disturb the peace.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.

People are fond of using the its not what you know, its who you know adage as an excuse for inaction, as if all successful people are born with powerful friends. Nonsense.

Other men’s pains are easily borne.

Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean- so get yourself a little loving in between.

I was born in a lovely white house with a garden.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

The things that are important to me – being a mother, a businesswoman, an activist – are all things that were borne out of great passion.

I have learned that champions aren’t just born; champions can be made when they embrace and commit to life-changing positive habits.