This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.

Shut your eyes and see.

Absence, the highest form of presence.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.

And this way, l'll leave everything behind before it gets the chance to do the same to me.

'Jihad' can mean holy war to extremists, but it means struggle to the average Muslim.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

We're ready for a real black President - someone like Jay-Z. Obama's fine, just not all black. He's our gateway Negro.

An idea that no one believes can not be proved too often.

There are no flaws in the soul of every human being.

In banking or insurance trust is the only thing you have to sell.

...the collapse of tsarism, while not improbably, was certainly not inevitable.

I've found through experience that I'm only good when I'm writing something that, in essence, only I could write. The times I've written for hire, for other people, I don't think I've done very well.

Progress. There's a good deal too much o' this progress about nowadays, an', what's more, it'll have to stop.