I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.

One can survive every hurt and move on, except the hatred of a mother formed without reasons, that one could not elucidate.

Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.

Cold is cold.

Few consider how much we are indebted to government, because few can represent how wretched mankind would be without it.

The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.

Maybe its a generational thing, but I never wanted to be the best black dancer in the world. I just wanted to be the best.

The best dresses are like t-shirts - you just put them on and forget about them.

Positive and negative emotions cannot occupy the mind at the same time.

I feel most real to myself in the studio.

I love gothic monsters, but I like to root them more firmly in the traditional folklore from which they sprang. Or at least, I like to evoke the feeling of those folk stories.