“Love was a country he knew nothing about.”

You write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

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.

There will be peace in the Middle East only when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel.

There’s an awareness of fashion in this country, and it’s not limited to gay people.

I love country music, but I find it very hard to take it seriously. I also think a lot of country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue in cheek.

I think every young child can learn through any martial art. They would then learn to respect their life, respect their parents, respect their country, and respect the whole world.

Birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda, and the victims of this paralysis are the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.

Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.

I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’ No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own – nobody.