I need, therefore I imagine.

Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.

Writing is a struggle against silence.

The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian and Caribbean history of the United States.

Art gives life to what history killed. Art gives voice to what history denied, silenced, or persecuted. Art brings truth to the lies of history.

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.

What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.

Give me agony or give me death, I'll take thy heart as eternal breath

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before.A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable loss.

If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched.

A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.

She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.

When we brand things, our brains perceive them as more special and valuable than they actually are.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

There is no way you're going to have an event like 9/11 and expect things to remain the same. They killed 3,000 people in New York on that day, and if they could have they would've killed 300,000.

It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.

Merit has rarely risen of itself, but a pebble or a twig is often quite sufficient for it to spring from to the highest ascent. There is usually some baseness before there is any elevation.