I wasn't part of any sixties movement. I'm skeptical of movements. I'm part of the times that I'm in.

I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.

Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."

I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.

Kau tak akan pernah mengerti, memang. Aku perempuan dan kau laki-laki. Jadi, perlakukanlah aku seperti seorang perempuan. Seranglah aku! Jangan tunggu aku menyerangmu.

The sky is a meadow of wildstar flowers.

Kindness has no religion – no boundaries. It is the trust of the soul.

Worry is a funky luxury when a lot has to be done.

I think it's my responsibility, to speak up when something threatens our very future.

Destiny is not necessarily what we get out of life, but rather, what we give.

Nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising.

The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication.

doubts, like facts, are stubborn things.