Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

Whoever you are, whatever you are, start with that, whether salt of the earth or only white sugar.

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself, actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something, no maybe junior and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

It is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of Europe, its midwives and healers, then crossed the oceans to Africa and the Americas and tortured and enslaved, raped, impoverished, and eradicated the peaceful, Christ-like people they found. And that the blueprint from which they worked, and still work, was the Bible.

The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.

The artist...is the voice of the people.

My ancestors make up the skin of the world. That's who that is. That's what that is. That's us.