I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.
All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.
I think that people don’t know how to do anything anymore. My father was a janitor. He could take a car apart and put it back together. He could build a house in the back yard. Today, if you ask people what they know, they say, ‘I know how to hire someone.’
We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.
Every day that we wake up is a good day. Every breath that we take is filled with hope for a better day. Every word that we speak is a chance to change what is bad into something good.
I understood about fear. And I knew better than anyone in that room what Mouse was capable of. But still I had been raised in a place where to show your fear was worse than cowardice. It was suicide, a sin.
There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together but men and women and their needs are all the same.
Lawyer even sounds like liar.
The police and I have a deal. I don’t talk to them and they don’t listen to me.
When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft.
I’m just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.
Freedom is a state of mind, I said wondering where I’d heard it before, not a state of being. We are all slaves to gravity and morality and the vicissitudes of nature. Our genes govern us much more than we’d like to think. Our bodies can not know absolute freedom but our minds can, can at least try.
I always tell people, if a young girl read “Beloved” as her first novel, she’d have to kill either herself or her mother, because in “Beloved” you have a mother killing their children. This is not something a child would accept very easily. And would never understand.
Rest easy and go with the faith you lived with.
My father cared about the world he lived in, and so he admitted his confusion about his place in America because he didn’t want me to make the same mistake in my life.
Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.
The older you get the more you live in the past.
The fear in my heart was like in one of those dreams where you try to run but you can’t do it, you can’t run because the fear is an anchor in your chest.
Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn’t then it’s not love at all.
People don’t understand how hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they’re reading when they’re talking to you about their books.