Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.