It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.

All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.

Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.

People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.

The wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection

When fear and suffering are disliked by me and others equally what is so special about me that I protect myself and not the other?

We are only different because there exists something to be different from, and it is this difference that bonds us.

Christlike love is the greatest need we have on this planet

True, the free market ignores the poor precisely as it does not recognize the wealthy - it is 'no respecter of persons'

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to.

... an institution cannot be run progressively on a basis of fear.

Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment.

If I could've made Muhammad Ali smaller I would have fought him.

He was ever precise in promise-keeping.