Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

I had a deep prejudice against the South. It's taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.

You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.

All Stories are True.

I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.

lips, red, ruby, like the blood, like the voice.

Low oil prices played a part in a major move by Congress voting to end the 40-year-old ban on exporting American crude oil.

Anything that benefits the public and not just big banking, that's what I'm with.

We need to re-create boundaries. When you carry a digital gadget that creates a virtual link to the office, you need to create a virtual boundary that didn't exist before.

I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of judges overruling presidents on national security matters.

I see no kind of reason to not just try everything. I mean, I feel like we all have such varied tastes, and to not just try our tastes is a crime.

Everyone grows old but not everyone grows up.

When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons. Somehow we're going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don't come suddenly.

I'm still that little girl who lisped and sat in the back of the car and threw vegetables at the back of her head when we drove home from the market. That never goes.