“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

“People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.”

“...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.”

“Its hard to communicate anything exactly and thats why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.”

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”

“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.”

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

“Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”