“Don’t worry. You’re just as sane as I am.”

Depression is the absence of hope.

Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.

Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.

I’ve been writing my entire life, and I’ll always write.

There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

Youth can not know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

Wherever I am, if I’ve got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy.

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

Courtesy dictates that we offer fellow wizards the opportunity of denying us entry.

Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don’t think anyone could have made me do it, or prevented me from doing it.

Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

Depression is deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it’s a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel.

Sometimes ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works.

To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.

The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one.

Never become bitter, and in the process, be happy and just go for it.

The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world.

I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine.

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

Whenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.