It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.

Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don't feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.

I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.

The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.

Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves

We get these lives for free. I didn't do anything to get this life, and no matter what the hardships are, it is free and, in a way, it's an extraordinary bargain.

Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.

I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it.

[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.

I would have offered you a forest of truth, but you wish to speak of a single leaf

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.

"Be courageous and keep moving forward"... that's kind of the mantra that I've tried to keep.

Painting is so close, so personal, so immediate, and so ordinary... It is the ordinary resurrections that define your painting.

The music is the shining path over which the poet travels to bring his song to the world.

When you love someone, what they want is the best that you can give them.

There's people saying that 'Jackie Brown' was a blaxploitation movie, when there's nothing at all blaxploitation about it other than Pam Grier being in it.

God did not intend that we should be cowards, or delinquents, or fools, or sinners or weaklings. He created us in his own image and commanded us to be men.

I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth.