It is a characteristic of human beings that if they haven’t got a family of their own, they will invent one.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.

I would have given my own life if I could have undone the killing of white men by my people.

My friends often tell me how very German I still am.

Two years before the last election you nor anyone else would have predicted that Barack Obama was going to get elected president of the United States.

Man is the poet who kills, Woman the angel who eats.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

You kin tame a bear. You kin tame a wild-cat and you kin tame a panther. ... You kin tame arything, son, excusin' the human tongue.

I'm more focused and have a greater sense of challenge, because I constantly feel the weight of time.

The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.

Right up to the middle of this century all perceptions of the world around us were delivered via the bookshelf or the paper route.