“Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.”

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

You are your own stories.

I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

He wants to put his story next to hers.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race – scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct, it has a social function, racism.

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake – otherwise it just walks on in your door.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

Passion is never enough; neither is skill.

My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilitie s; it’s choosing the ones you want.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of bullshit.

The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty.

You can’t have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That’s a recipe for disaster. And I don’t mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office.

Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow’s problems flow.

Somehow it’s O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, ‘I never learned to read,’ they’d say I was an illiterate dolt.

Literature is a splendid mistress, but a bad wife.