“Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”

Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.

There’s always a backlash against progressive ideas.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it.

Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.

I look forward and see myself look back.

If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.

Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss.

Keeping a journal implies hope.

As long as I’m facing the right direction, it doesn’t matter the size of my steps.

People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn’t. Social attitudes don’t change in a straight line.

I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.

The parity of women’s health. It’s very depressing to think that you win these rights, but then you have to win them again, and again, and again, and fight the same battles over and over.

Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.

Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.

Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison. On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.

That’s what we’re all doing, all the time, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not. Creating something on the spur of the moment with the materials at hand.

Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.

If asked whether you love God, say nothing. This is because if you say, ‘I do not love God,’you are an unbeliever. If, on the other hand, you say, ‘I do love God,’ your actions contradict you.

For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.

You reach out your hand, but you’re all alone, in those time passages.

On the other hand, to eradicate illiteracy requires that we elect a fair and efficient political regime.

I have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I’m concerned that the rampant downloading of my copyright-protected material over the Internet is severely eating into my album sales and having a decidedly adverse effect on my career.