“Both class and race survive education, and neither should. What is education then? If it doesn’t help a human being to recognize that humanity is humanity, what is it for? So you can make a bigger salary than other people?”

Having grown up in a racist culture where 2 and 2 are not 5, I have found life to be incredibly theatrical and theater to be profoundly lifeless.

Race, what is that? Race is a competition, somebody winning and somebody losing. Blood doesn’t run in races! Come on!

Heaven and earth! How is it that bodies join but never meet?

For me life is a challenge. And it will be a challenge if I live to be 100 or if I get to be a trillionaire.

There are a lot of movies out there that I would hate to be paid to do, some real demeaning, real woman-denigrating stuff. It is up to women to change their roles. They are going to have to write the stuff and do it. And they will.

When people look only at the surface and that satisfies them and they think from that surface they see, that is to be truly blind.

Nature is neither reasonable nor just. Nature is exact.

Race? It is a feeling, not a reality. Ninety-five per cent, at least. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today….

We must give Italians a sense of race.

Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,

I could have told you. I hate horses, and horse racing. Always have. But you didn’t bother to ask me.

Iowa is an amazing place. But I didn’t have much race around me. I was definitely not like everyone there.

Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.

I think more women should be involved in politics for the good of the human race.

National pride has no need of the delirium of race.