You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing.... And never take advice, including this.

God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.

It is such a relief to be told the truth.

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

I think I've only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.

I love to praise what I love, and I won't for a minute believe that love is blind -- indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything.