“I was taught you don't tell your secrets to strangers - certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements rece...”

“If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were...”

“As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back ...”

“Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain ...”

“What's often not acknowledged about depression is how much anger is in it.”

“I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.”

“I have seen the best of you, and the worst of you, and I choose both.”

“Be the one who nurtures and builds. Be the one who has an understanding and a forgiving heart one who looks for the best in people. Leave people better than you found them.”

“Was it possible that the emotion of love had somehow made me more susceptible to fear? Does the noble emotion of love make us start valuing our own lives and the lives of our loved ones more so tha...”

“The only person who needs to know about failure is yourself.”

“I have tried every diet to lose weight. When you restrict yourself, you're setting yourself up for failure.”

“We've all experienced those days when we feel like an absolute failure. It's a normal feeling when things don't go as exactly planned. And, when we feel like that, it's challenging to think of your...”

“You get a timeless cool card in New York.”

“People recognize certain things, like 'D' means 'this dialogue stinks.' We're dealing with shows that are written here, shot in New York and posted back here. Accurate communication is a necessity.”

“What's more important than who's going to be the first black manager is who's going to be the first black sports editor of the New York Times.”