Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

I had a deep prejudice against the South. It's taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.

You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.

All Stories are True.

I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.

I care. I care a lot. I think of "Cosmopolitan" all day and I run scared. So it's a combination of fright caring and anxiety.

Be noble in every thought And in every deed!

As an early child, I tried to play every kind of music that I heard. I thought everyone was doing that.

Now you are come! You tremble like a star Poised where, behind earth's rim, the sun has set. Your voice has sung across my heart, but numb And mute, I have no tones to answer.

Negative states of mind, such as anger, resentment, fear, envy, and jealousy, are products of the ego.

There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.

You can take as much as you can from the generation that has preceded you, but then it's up to you to make something new.

One of the things that really fascinates me about movies is that they make seemingly ordinary moments be filled with some curiosity or some energy or some mystery.

Borders are semiporous. Capital flows more freely than people across them. on C Span.

There is a troublesome humor some men have, that if they may not lead, they will not follow; but had rather a thing were never done, than not done their own way, tho' other ways very desirable.