If you're bored, your readers will be bored. If you're faking it, you won't get the kind of readers you want.

I can see criticizing, complaining, protesting - anything but choosing not to vote. Too many people died for us not to vote.

Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about.

Home is the place where there is somebody who does not wish you any pain.

You can get away with anything as long as it works.

I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a mistake.

It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine.

People from Europe and people from Africa encountered one another long before the invention of "Europe" and "Africa" and "white people" and "black people."

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.

I can see Obama trying to be the president who suggests solutions for everyone who has experienced economic hardship.

Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it's not such a big deal.

You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and thatsight becomes this art.

Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.

The world’s deadliest mercenaries choose to serve you, the whispers say, because they have yet to meet me.

My issue with campaign finance is 100 percent disclosure. Wear a suit with patches from your big contributors. Depending on the size of the contribution, that's how big the patch should be.

Art is a by-product of an honest and successful attempt to do something well.

As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

Sure, I've been on the Tube...I caught it to Eastbourne once.

Younger guys now are all working out, and you find that if everyone's doing it and you're not doing it, you're going to be left behind.

I think any time you couple the term "Wall Street" with "bailout" or something like that, you know - I don't like what's going on in Wall Street.