 As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think. |
| The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it. |
| You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say? |
| The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book. |
| One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to. |
| Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers. |
| I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people. |
| Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all. |
| Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time. |
| Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth. |
| Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. |
| I get angry about things, then go on and work. |
| There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people. |
| A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people. |
| If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. |
| Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable. |
| I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort. |
| I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. |
| If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression. |
| The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. |
