“Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.”

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.

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.

A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.

Today is always here,’ said Sethe. ‘Tomorrow, never.

You have to be a little tough, and rely on yourself. And tell people ‘No’.

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom.

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

When we function from a fearful, low-level energetic state, our thoughts and energy can literally pollute the world.

Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.

We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.

My father literally fought his entire life to ensure the inclusion of all people because he understood that we were intertwined and connected together in humanity.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

In his eyes, she was both poetry and literature.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap – people shouldn’t read that stuff.