I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

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.

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.

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

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

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

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

And I choose to be aloneRather than wrapped in arms I could never need.

You don't have to reach for the stars if you are already shining like one.

What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin.

Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honors or of wealth.

If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.

In Scotland, the indication is that for the Westminster elections at least, Labour voters are satisfied with their government.

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.

I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode.