American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

It's easier to hate than to hurt.

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

There are sordid souls that eat and drink and breed and die, and imagine they have lived.

I can come up sometimes with ideas for scenes that I'm not in, to make it better or add something. It's not about me, or my ego, that I wanna show this or that.

I actually think one of my strengths is my storytelling.

I work out, I go to pilates, I walk and I eat everything I can get my hands on.

No man was ever great by imitation.

Say, "I can do everything ." "Even if poison of a snake is powerless if you can firmly deny it."

The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.