If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

All that you touchYou Change.All that you ChangeChanges you.The only lasting truthis Change.Godis Change.

God is Change.Earthseed: The Books of the LivingLauren Oya Olamina

Names are powerful and are prophecies of the future. The name you are called is a sign of what you are and what you would become.

It is difficult to call myself a writer, even when I stand at a podium to receive a prize, I feel uncomfortable calling myself a writer—I am merely a word criminal.

Woven into our lives is the very fire from the stars and genes from the sea creatures, and everyone, utterly everyone, is kin in the radiant tapestry of being.

Only the boring get bored

I don't believe that Freedom of Information laws, which have arbitrary time periods or broad blanket exemptions, meet the level of transparency that society needs today.

To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.

It don't take me no three days to record no album.

I put pressure on myself to propose something new - I think it's the minimum that you can do as a fashion designer.

The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.