The more I wonder, the more I love.

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you. So, the best way to get them to read, is to read. The best way to get them to do anything is to do it yourself, and they will absolutely copy you. That way, you don't have to worry about what's supposedly age appropriate, a child will pick something up when the child is ready.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same, there's a real lightheartednes s about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.

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 didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don't mean nothing if you don't ast why you here, period

I write not only what I want to read...I write all the things I should have been able to read.

My activism really is for myself, because I see places in the world where I feel I should be. If there is something really bad, really evil, happening somewhere, then that is where I should be. I need, for myself, to feel that I have stood there. It feels a lot better than just watching it on television.