“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.

Racism will disappear when it’s no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it’ll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

He can’t value you more than you value yourself.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

Being able to laugh got me through.

What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?

I always know the ending; that’s where I start.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.

Money doesn’t give you any license to relax. It gives you an opportunity to use all your abilities, free of financial worries, to go forward, and to use your superior advantages and talents to help others.

As a leader, you have to have the ability to assimilate new information and understand that there might be a different view.

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

Waiting for the 100 percent right and certain solution leads to delay, indecision, and an inability to execute.

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.