“You gotta be optimistic to be single. Stupid! You have to be stupid. That's what optimistic means, you know. It means stupid. An optimist is somebody that goes, 'Hey, maybe something nice will happ...”

“I think you have to try and fail, because failure gets you closer to what you're good at.”

“Breaking records is not something you expect to be doing. That's like a sports thing, it's not usually a comedy and writing thing.”

“I have a crazy amount of different jobs, so the way I manage that is to not do more than one at a time. It's like old computers that had small memory chips, they would do something called swapping,...”

“The problem is, the more famous you get, the more people see you who didn't choose to.”

“America's a family. We all yell at each other. It all works out.”

“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.”

“A small hole in his shirt revealed a gooey red blob right in the meaty part above his armpit, blood pouring from the wound. It hurt. It hurt bad. If hed thought his headache downstairs had been tou...”

“One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror. ”

“I think war is a dangerous place.”

“You two are too cute, the counter girl said, setting two cups piled with whipped cream on the counter. She had a sort of lopsided, open smile that made me think she laughed a lot. Seriously. How lo...”

“Life reality tells us that to grow physically, you first need to grow inwardly”

“Remember, one step leads to the other and therefore never neglect the first step. It will give you the confidence you need to sail through with victory”