Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.
One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
I work very hard, and I play very hard. I'm grateful for life. And I live it - I believe life loves the liver of it. I live it.
I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.
I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
I'm always disappointed when people don't live up to their potential. I know that a number of people look down on themselves and consequently on everybody who looks like them. But that, too, can change.
I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see, because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.
I know for sure that loves saves me and that it is here to save us all.
Life loves the liver of it.
There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people - one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion's den. You can't just play around with all those big cats - you've got to take somebody on.
The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt and a magnolia in your hair, do it. Even if you're wrinkled.
While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man's humanity to man.
I love a Hebrew National hot dog with an ice-cold Corona - no lime. If the phone rings, I won't answer until I'm done.
And if a person is religious, I think it's good, it helps you a bit. But if you're not, at least you can have the sense that there is a condition inside you which looks at the stars with amazement and awe.
One of the wonderful things about Oprah: She teaches you to keep on stepping.
Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication.
Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, 'Children's Letters to God.' You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.'
I'm very, very serious - I'm serious enough not to take myself too seriously. That means I can be completely wedded to the moment. But when I leave that moment, I want to be completely wedded to the next moment.
I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.
I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.
I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.
The hope, the hope that lives in the breast of the black American, is just so tremendous that it overwhelms me sometimes.
In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.
All information belongs to everybody all the time. It should be available. It should be accessible to the child, to the woman, to the man, to the old person, to the semiliterate, to the presidents of universities, to everyone. It should be open.
