You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

I don't do the things other people call "play."

Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book - that for me is what literature does.