If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.

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.

I just want to live in a way that either wakes people up or shakes people up. Whether I have opened a wound or opened a heart, I have touched a life and helped bring a change.

Pray that you are in the right place, at the right time, to meet the right person, that together you may help one another.

My scalp tingled like Christmas candy on a cold tongue.

It is tormenting to fear what you cannot overcome.

I do love competence in a man.

Each time that I have two or three days off, I'm off somewhere in California.

My admiration for the phenomenon of Alcoholics Anonymous is boundless.

Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks.

I didn't want to be the sissy figure skater, you know.

I'm a bitter, sad, sour young man who makes a career out of hastling people with real careers.