Anger becomes limiting, restricting. You can't see through it. While anger is there, look at that, too. But after a while, you have to look at something else.

Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.

One must always be aware, to notice even though the cost of noticing is to become responsible.

Let heartbreak be alternative to coffe break, five midmorning minutes devoted to emotion.

The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman. Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.

the truth is not supposed to free you from the truth, just from everything else

One must always be aware, to notice—even though the cost of noticing is to become responsible.

The Qu'ran is God's song, not ours, not even Muhammad's. To allow such a song to pass through one's body, however imperfectly, is to discover that the instrument is transformed by the music.

Long has black powder been in the hands of dwarves alone. Alas, winds ever change and nothing remains the same forever.Lord Arrlo Salkeld

A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side — wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.

Success is built on disappointment, and disappointment is inherent in all success.

Nearly everything I do is part of a master plan to make me the most important entertainer in the world.

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence, and anyone who can read without moving his lips should know it by now.

I learned, especially from my mother, to respect the profession and take it seriously, but not take yourself too seriously.

Habit creates the appearance of justice; progress has no greater enemy than habit.

A man must completely despair of himself in order to become fit to obtain the grace of Christ.