The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

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.

You never really learn much from hearing yourself speak.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

I love doing both theater and television. I definitely foresee more Broadway, but I think I would like to keep the singing and the TV separate.

I did have role models, but most of them were male.

I know from personal conversation and from personal interaction, that Hillary Clinton cares deeply about issues of inclusion.

We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact the ideal version of their lives.

If someone wants to employ me, whoever wants to employ me, I'll go and do that. I just want to work.

It has been a difficult road this year, but still I look at every day as a new opportunity.

Insanity is coasting through life.

It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.