I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

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.

We're so afraid of being hurt that we become the abuser first.

I had spent my whole life feeling homesick. The only difference between the two of us was that I didn't know what or where home was.

Stuck in high school for the rest of my natural life. Talk about hell.

Abortion can never be safe. Any procedure where "success" means the killing of another human being can certainly not be safe.

I'm retarded - I mean I'm retired.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

But little do or can the best of us: That little is achieved through Liberty.

When you don't have much and you need to be at work, there's no such thing as being sick.