Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself

Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.

All art is knowing when to stop.