One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.

Writing is a struggle against silence.

The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian and Caribbean history of the United States.

Art gives life to what history killed. Art gives voice to what history denied, silenced, or persecuted. Art brings truth to the lies of history.

I need, therefore I imagine.

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.

What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

When you have acceptance of who you are there is no need to discuss your past.

I listened to make sure I was meeting the minimum requirement to stay out of jail, so to speak.

I place an enormous premium on loyalty. If someone betrays me, I can forgive them rationally, but emotionally I have found it impossible to do so.

Religion Has made an honest woman of the supernatural, And we won't have it kicking over the traces again.

I think first impressions are important when you pick up a script.

Almost all thinking people agree that you should not have probability 1 (or 0) for any event, other than one demonstrable by logic, like 2 x 2 = 4.

One of the happiest days of my life is when I made five or six hundred pesos from a crop of watermelons I raise all on my own.

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.

Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.