I think if I could not get myself off my cushion, off my couch, or away from whatever I'm eating - or drinking or partying or whatever - if I couldn't get away from that, I would have a heavy heart.

No song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories.

Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength - in search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God.

I'm very disappointed in Barack Obama. I was very much in support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the banks. I cannot support his caving in to Benjamin Netanyahu. I think many black people support him because they're so happy to have handsome black man in the White House. But it doesn't make me happy if that handsome black man in the White House is betraying all of our traditional values of peace, peoplehood, caring about strangers, feeding the hungry, and not bombing children.

I don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of.

I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I'm here.