When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.

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.

I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language because of the use of the word "like." "I'm like, he's like" - not "thought," not "as if ."

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.