For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.

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.

I had too many things to say, and too small a brain to sort them out with.

You can expect nothing in being a musician, and you have to be just very thankful every time it goes positively for you.

Certainly the worker has nothing to lose by a change from government and capitalism to a condition of no government, of anarchy.

How hard, how desperately hard, is the way of the experimenter in art!

You have authority over every storm you can sleep in

While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.

Everyone's doing the best they can with the tools they were given.

People do not realize that Alzheimer's is not old age. It is a progressive and fatal disease, and staggering amounts of people develop Alzheimer's every day.

Spirit moves through all things.

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all.