I'm a descendant of someone bought and sold, and brought in 1619 in what was to become the United States.

You can't use up creativity, creative thinking builds on itself and increases the creativity of the thinker...You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

My mother raised me, and then freed me.

My son is the best thing that ever happened to me. And through me - to a lot of people.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

The autobiographer looks at life through the lens of his or her own life and really uses herself or himself as the jumping-off place to examine the social mores and the economic and political climates. In a way, the autobiography becomes history as well as the story of one person, for it becomes the story of a family or the story of the state or nation.

Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.