The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people's attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.

All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.

Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.

People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done

Obama had reached out to the business community, they just haven't liked all of his decisions and some of his rhetoric. But generally, I think the administration is quite open and accessible.

Some members of Congress ought to have their mouths taped instead of their speeches.

Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent.

Things that make us alike are finer and stronger than the things that make us different.

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.

We led the industrial revolution, the White revolution, now its time for a cultural revolution.

It's one of those magical acts that is so poly-sensorial and culturally enriching that as a designer one is naturally drawn to the cult of the object

Risk discomfort and solitude for understanding.