We're dreamers and - since we only have one life, and if we screw up we can get in a world of trouble - we're very intense dreamers.

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.

If life is a stage and you are your own agent, then don’t hesitate to play the character you wish to play.

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up.

The Prophet defeated the enemies of Islam even when he and his followers were small in number.

To show the world what long experience gains, requires not courage, though it calls for pains; but at life's outset to inform mankind is a bold effort of a valiant mind.

I guess this proves there are as many nuts in the Academy as anywhere else.

Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.

Death, like virtue, has its degrees.

In a houseful of toddlers and pets, you can start out having a bad day, but you keep getting detoured.

Goals should always be made to a point that will make us reach and strain.

Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?