“Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.”

If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

Being able to laugh got me through.

What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?

I always know the ending; that’s where I start.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.

Today is always here,’ said Sethe. ‘Tomorrow, never.

You have to be a little tough, and rely on yourself. And tell people ‘No’.

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom.

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

The oration of poetry, I consider to be its own art form and tradition.

Poetry is – it’s an art form, but, to me, it’s also a weapon, it’s also an instrument. It’s the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that’s a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.

I definitely think that fashion is a form of art and love that people can express themselves through what they wear.

Even though Prince wasn’t rapping and it was a whole different era, it shows how artists expressed themselves without saying too much, and that was the real beauty of the art.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

There is an art of seeing things as they are: without naming, without being caught in a network of words, without thinking interfering with perception.

I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.