I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

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.

It's not a homeless life for me, It's just that I'm home lessThan others like to be.

Try again

I am, for the most part, who I am because my good mother was who she was.

Possessions and positions may promote our happiness but cannot create it. Happiness is a state created by self through the realization of how the self is important to the creator.

Family is family over the internet, over Skype, over the telephone. Love is love. You don't have to actually go through some ritual to prove that you love somebody.

My philosophy is always, "Let's get the spirit of the character." If people believe in it and the spirit of it, then it will work.

The first thing [in career and motherhood] is a great husband. That I found many years ago and I am lucky in that way.

I love draping; it's less about proportion than fit and the fabric. It's very specialized and I think when women see the construction, they respond to it immediately.

I'm a street fighter. I'm ready for any kind of mixed martial arts that comes at me.

All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law.