People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing “mere” about symbols.

The wind considers how trauma is - in essence - just a memory that violates previous memories too barbarically, an event that devastatingly conflicts against everything else one knows.

When the economic orthodoxy can no longer deliver, political turbulence follows. That doesn't mean the left will win, but it means there is an opportunity to be seized.

Now suddenly you got members of your [White House] team who were 23, 24. They've met their wives here, or their husbands here.

Imagine how you’d feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn’t stand.

You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well that they can employ only certain means to achieve the ends they want.

health in all lands is among the indispensable guarantees of human progress.

Growing up with country, R&B, gospel, and classical music from my grandmother and pop, Tuskegee was the perfect melting pot for my influences as a writer.

Nonviolence or soul force does not need physical aids for its propagation of effect.

I would like to remind the black ministry and indeed all black people that God is not in the habit of coming down from heaven to solve people's problems on earth.