“Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties.”

“In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our childre...”

“Being a pathfinder is to be willing to risk failure and still go on.”

“The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.”

“The delights of self-discovery are always available.”

“When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.”

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.”

“I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prov...”

“Not everything you're good at is what you're called to do.”

“We all have the capacity to find the will to do what must be done - even when that which we must do terrifies us most. Remember this.”

“It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which...”

“The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.”