The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.

God's being good does not somehow magically make all Christians good.

Trust works both ways

God is creating at every moment of the world's existence in and through the perpetually endowed creativity of the very stuff of the world.

Your definition of who you are is your prison. You can set yourself free at any time.

Contradiction is the essence of the universe.

Another life, if it were not better than this, would be less a promise than a threat.

It's possible and available to any artist to be himself or herself on their own terms, to be accepted and embraced by black people. You don't have to be a thug to get love from black people.

God in my mind gives you what you need. So, if you need God to be a black woman and you need that for whatever your reasons are, then perhaps your blessings will come in that form.

The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.

The qualities of creativity and genius are within you, awaiting your decision to match up with the power of intention.