“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.

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.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

All important things are hard.

We were a short lived anthology of things no one else could read.

A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.

I always write the end of everything first. I always write the last chapters of my books before I write the beginning. Then I go back to the beginning. I mean, it’s always nice to know where you’re going is my theory.

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?

I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get.

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

I am Envy, I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.