“It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.”

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

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.

Art is a form of consciousness.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Music changes, and I’m gonna change right along with it.

I do not think I reinvent myself. Wearing my hair differently or changing my style of dress is playing dress-up. I don’t take it too seriously.

We all know the leopard can’t change his stripes.

The moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable…that what we take for granted may not be here for our children

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There’s a song that says, “the time ain’t long.” That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come.

President Obama attacks success and therefore under President Obama we have less success and I will change that.

I honestly believe going independent is the future. Social is changing, Spotify is changing, everything is changing.