“One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?”

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.

Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.

All authors to their own defects are blind.

Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh to -day as when they first passed through their authors’ minds ages ago.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

An author accepting language’s invitation to dance steps onto the floor of his her sensibility-charged consciousness and begins to move instinctively–even if with much dread

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process–it is, after all, black magic.

Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn’t saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don’t know, but every character is an extension of the author’s own personality.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.