“If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.”

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

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

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

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.

Green and black go well together, dont they?

I don’t just want to be the best black player or the best Asian player. I want to be the best golfer ever.

I look at modeling as something I’m doing for black people in general.

Good actors I’ve worked with all started out making faces in a mirror, and you keep making faces all your life.

Some girls like to say one thing and mean another. And me being who I am, I’m very straightforward. Everything is very black and white for me. I don’t really like playing mind games.

The mere physical man is like the ant crawling on the paper, who observes black lettering and attributes its production to the pen and nothing more.

At 50, I thought proudly: Here we are, half century! Being 60 was fairly frightening. You want to know how I spent my 70th birthday? I put on a completely black face, a fuzzy black Afro wig, wore black clothes and hung a black wreath on my door.

I was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.