People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.

There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

People don't make changes because things are wonderful.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.

A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

I'm so used to being misunderstood.

I’ve grown up defined by this desperate, undeniable, ‘can’t breathe’ kind of space inside of myself and I’m afraid that the diagnosis is fatal.

A central part of the torturer’s craft is to make his job easier by stripping the victim of protective dignity.

Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?

When you play Bobby, it is not a question if you win or lose. It is a question if you survive.

Stress is wanting something to be the way it isn't.

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away

I get drunk writing words. I don't drink or do drugs, but I get so carried away with writing that I get inebriated from it.

I learned nothing while I was in school.

They took a survey: Why do men get up in the middle of the night? Ten percent get up to go to the bathroom and 90 percent get up to go home.

It's much easier to stay out of trouble now than to get out of trouble later.