Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

Darkness became her world...

Our relations with the other powers of Europe have experienced no essential change since the last session.

So we don't need more top-down economics. We've tried that theory. We've seen what happens. We can't afford to go back to it.

Thirty percent of the Nation's energy comes off the gulf coast.

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.

When somebody underestimated me, it made me want to prove them wrong.

You stand next to the sea and you're in touch with all your longings and all your losses.

sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy

The Japanese put houses in among the trees and allowed nature to gain the ascendancy in any composition.

Birth, and copulation, and death; that's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.