A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

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 believe I went through a divorce. My relationship with Ellen is no less significant as a marriage than my relationship to Coley.

A perfect world or a world destroyed, one or the other- someday will come the end of hell.

I'm way too focused to let anything stop me.

The popcorn button on the microwave is a miraculous invention. More miraculous than even the microwave itself.

My landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful'.

Nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us still by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots.

I do not like work even when someone else is doing it.

Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.

God lives, feels and suffers in every one of us, and in course of time, His attributes, knowledge, beauty and love will be revealed in each of us.

Let Catholics build their own churches and works.