I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

People don't do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do right because the world doesn't make sense if you don't.

... survival is the least of my desires.

It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way.

I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.