I asked her if I was black or white. She replied "You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

It's a real stumper to sit around and try to think in your own head, but when you go into somebody else's head that takes the foot off the breaks. You can think in someone else's head.

The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus.

If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.

It is hard to find romance in the present because there's nothing left to the imagination.

I can write anywhere really. I have a hard time writing when the birds are tweeting and the brooks are running outside. I've tried that several times, for months at a time, trying to write in a quiet, wonderful place where birds are twittering and coffee's brewing. And nothing happens. But if I'm in an old dump like my old apartment and I can't find my fingernail clippers and nothing's working except the old tea maker, that's just great. You always have to find and live in a place that's a little uncomfortable when you're a writer. You need a burr in your side.

There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.