It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

A good Christian, never take advantage of other people

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.

Once people start to think they've wasted parts of their life, or they're wasting their life as they speak, that means there's going to be great dramatic and comedic tension.

Originality is for people with short memories

I want to go to the gym every day otherwise I feel really bad. I just want to get more toned and healthy.

I am very much afraid of definitions, and yet one is almost forced to make them. One must take care, too, not to be inhibited by them.

The difficulty with becoming a patient is that as soon as you get horizontal, part of your being yearns, not for a doctor, but for a medicine man.

The observations that have developed over the years have given us perspective about where we fit in. We are newcomers, really recent arrivals on a planet that is four and a half billion years old.

Danger is a very rare commodity in these times, monopolized by intelligence agencies and stuntmen.