I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about writing.

There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

People don't make changes because things are wonderful.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.

A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

I'm so used to being misunderstood.

I just don't see why the past has to matter.

We were given the Scriptures to humble us into realizing that God is right, and the rest of us are just guessing.

You're crazy, ' I say.'Aye, ' Logan says. 'Crazy about you.

This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.

We don't have milk cows. People have so many stereotypes of people from where I come from - Oklahoma. We don't ride around in covered wagons, either.

We can refute assertions, but who can refute silence?

I loved being in the Senate. That was a wonderful experience.

What would they say if they knew I sit for two months on six lines of poetry?

Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.

Eat... to live, and do not live to eat.