We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it's the only place where I am that I never think about when I'm leaving.

I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color - light, black, in-between - as the marker for race is really an error.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.