The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession.

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.

Your intelligence is defined by your intuitive question not by your definitive answers.

The little weasel ripped all the buttons off my couch.Ivan Petrovsky, pg 350

This summer one-third of the nation will be ill-housed ill-nourished and ill-clad. Only they call it a vacation.

Talk to women who've ever dated an Arab man. The results are not good.

By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance.

You don't do anything to further your stay aboard a ship that you see is going to go down to the bottom of the ocean.

If you know much about your work - why you work, how you work, your aims - you are probably not a poet.

Hold the door for an old man. Old ladies can take care of themselves; they've been doing it long enough.

When politicians presume to do God's work, they do not become divine but diabolical.