“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”

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.

At the end of the day, I don’t know what makes any artist say what he says. Everyone has a reason for whatever it is they do.

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is another question.

Even though Prince wasn’t rapping and it was a whole different era, it shows how artists expressed themselves without saying too much, and that was the real beauty of the art.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Let not a man do what his sense of right bids him not to do, nor desire what it forbids him to desire. This is sufficient. The skillful artist will not alter his measures for the sake of a stupid workman.

One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that’s always amazing to me.

The out-of-work actor wears out more than shoe leather. The very sensibilities that make him an artist are shattered by the disregard he is shown as a human being.