I do hope that young men and women will start to think for themselves and start to take responsibility for their own thoughts.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

You don't want modesty, you want humility. Humility comes from inside out. It says someone was here before me and I'm here because I've been paid for. I have something to do and I will do that because I'm paying for someone else who has yet to come.

The Holy Spirit upon my left leads my feet without ceasing into the camp of the righteous and into the tents of the free.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.

I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world's variety and uniqueness.

Determine to live life with flair and laughter.