Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions.

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.

Whenever I went to an historical moment that was sad or where something terrible happened, it was, for me, a learning moment, a teaching moment for those who survived.

I usually feel something before I know it.

If you're just mired in privilege, there's nothing to learn; learning appears to be over.

Bruce Lee, before he fought, he would try to visualize how the fight would go, because he was visualizing a victorious path out of the combat.

I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.

Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.

I think poetry can lead to policy, and I can hear the laughter when I say that.

Ah! Beautiful Paris! Where smiles bloom on stone.

The Paradox of Change: People can only change when they feel accepted as they are now. Dr. Arnold Beisser Pg 220

I guess I'd always mocked the American accent. I didn't consider it a respectable dialect, but I was told that it was.

It's no wonder there is a mad scramble for victim status on many campuses today. It confers authority and prestige.

Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive - or praising you after you ain’t.

Men hate the haughty of heart who will not be the friend of every man.

Humility feels that there is someone, somewhere who can do anything I can do better - except one thing: no one can be better at being me.

By the time you're 30, you know who you are inside. You learn to laugh at things you can't change; you learn to be yourself.

Do my eyes deceive me, or is Senna's Lotus sounding rough?

Art itself is underserved when we don't realize the power of it.