For years I felt that I wasn't ready to take on slavery. It's a huge topic, and I didn't want to mess it up.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

Innovative solutions to new challenges seldom come from familiar places

All stories are true, Astrea. By speaking them aloud, we bring them to life. Once words mingle with breath and sound, they become something new and alive.

A writer's work is never done, unless he or she has no readers.

Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

I'll tell you how the Sun rose.

A seven year old to a neighbor after the boy's house burned down, "Oh, that was not our home. That was our house. We still have our home. We just don't have a place to put it right now."

If you do not have the power to compete with the best believers in good deeds, then compete with the sinners in asking for Allah’s forgiveness.

'Dare to Discipline' was published in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and a culture of rebellion. The book was written in that context, but the principles of child rearing have not changed.

You know how little while we have to stay, And, once departed, may return no more.