Freedom is having real choice. This offers a limited amount of choices. This is participating in a very imperfect system that we're desperately hanging onto, that we don't want to see further eroded.

I can see criticizing, complaining, protesting - anything but choosing not to vote. Too many people died for us not to vote.

Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about.

Home is the place where there is somebody who does not wish you any pain.

You can get away with anything as long as it works.

I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a mistake.

It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine.

People from Europe and people from Africa encountered one another long before the invention of "Europe" and "Africa" and "white people" and "black people."

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.

If you're bored, your readers will be bored. If you're faking it, you won't get the kind of readers you want.

I can see Obama trying to be the president who suggests solutions for everyone who has experienced economic hardship.

He was an indecent man, I told myself - prayerfully - and then I prayed for him to become decent.

If you had to relive your life exactly as it was – same successes and failures, same happiness, same miseries, same mixture of comedy and tragedy – would you want to? Was it worth it?

Locks or no locks, you're not going to cage me in.

We do not stop. You all took the oath to come here. Hard work lies before us in breeding our new community. - Adrian

God does not exist everywhere. Not in the temple, not in the mosque, not in the church and not everywhere. GOD was just there in your heart, in your mind.

Today is a fantasy for tomorrow has gone and yesterday is here!

We rehearsed for two weeks [in "Fences"], and we taped out the whole house in the front, and the rooms, and we stood it up like a play. We tried to get off book and gave people small props.

I think women have the ability to stick with things over a long period of time.

Human nature is good, just as water seeks low ground. There is no man who is not good, just as there is no water that does not flow downward.

If my musical tastes are continuing to grow up, and I am not really too interested in the music that my kids listen to, then I assume that the audience is doing the same.