Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

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.

We try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory.

Education is the process of selling someone on books.

What is the nature of human beings? When someone does something wrong to them, they will go after him [to punish, to fight].

Work for your terrestrial life in proportion to your location in it, and work for your afterlife in proportion to your eternity in it.

Why do they call it research if I've only done it this one time?

The secret to a happy marriage is patience and honesty. I really mean that. You have to be patient, you have to be open, and you also have to be available for criticism, too.

If you were to open up a baby's head - and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should - you would find nothing but an enormous drool gland.

It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.

I never thought I'd live to see the day that an American administration would denounce the state of Israel for rebuilding Jerusalem.

There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art.