I sang “O Holy Night” in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
I type in one place, but I write all over the house.
From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers – not the defined.
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ’em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.
I tell my students there is such a thing as ‘writer’s block,’ and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now.
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder.
Laughter is more serious than tears.
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.