Author

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman, since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women.

It's a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they're different. It's very limiting.

Yang tersulit adalah Anda bisa sangat peduli dengan seseorang dan tidak ingin hidup bersamanya lagi.

As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.

I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.

A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic - I use this metaphor a lot but I'll use it again - it's like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries - it's just what happens with this being, now.

It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.