Little children are all writers.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!

There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.

I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.

I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it.

You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker

You may not be a great success when you are too busy with life and forget to love.

If I am to be a skeleton in a box buried deep into the ground, I pray you will be the dust that rests atop my bones.

...we fear monsters because we fear the dark parts of ourselves...

Murder rectifies nothing.

If you want to be a leader of people, you must learn to watch events.

The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.

I'm a giraffe. I even walk like a giraffe with a long neck and legs. It's a pretty dumb animal, mind you.

Oh, well. At least my blood is flowing.

It is the childlike part of us that produces works of the imagination. When we were children time passed so slow with us that we seemed to have time for everything.