We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.

Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.

Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

I know how bad a thing it is to be a slave and I know how terrible it was but I don't believe that there's a free person in the whole world that knows how good a cup full of water can taste. Because you have to be a deprived slave, to be kept waiting for your water like we were to really appreciate how good just one swallow can be. When we finally got a drop on our tongues it was like something straight from the hands of the Almighty.

Losing my parents really set me adrift in more ways than one. It's not just losing them. It's losing the possibility of family.

The fear in my heart was like in one of those dreams where you try to run but you can't do it, you can't run because the fear is an anchor in your chest.