An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

I was mischievous. I wasn’t bad. I stole food so we could eat. My mother didn’t know. I used to tell her some man gave me $10 to sweep out the yard. I was like Robin Hood. I took from the rich and gave to the poor. Me.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

Fortunately, we have help from the media. I have to say this: I’m very grateful for the support and kindness that we’ve gotten. People have respected their privacy and in that way, I think, you know, no matter what people may feel about my husband’s policies or what have you, they care about children and that’s been good to see.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

While children are struggling to be unique, the world around them is trying all means to make them look like everybody else.

A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don’t have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.

It’s a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

Being humble matters.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

I’m not talent. Not considered ‚talent‘ by Lifetime. I’d like to say I’m their savior, but that would be cocky.

I’d like to think that I’m a calm and sweet person. I tend to be very playful at home with my children, but in life… we have to fight our battles – our work battles, our political battles, our personal battles – and we’re focused.

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don’t give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

A home without books is a body without soul.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

I think any activity you have your kids in, you’re all trying to live vicariously through them. And you’re jealous of the kid that’s naturally more talented or has the facility, the body, the genes, or the God-given talent. People get jealous of that.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

Start with God – the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning.

I’m not a nerd, don’t plan to be a nerd and read books – which I can’t do at all.

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

I do not see myself as a celebrity or an icon or things like that… I have not really done anything.

I was born on a full moon. Both my children were born on full moons, too. Some people say that’s scary. It is what it is, man, I don’t be trippin‘. I couldn’t tell God when I wanted to be born.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

My kids are the funniest two human beings there are.

My mother insisted that her children read.

We make the Sabbath a delight when we teach the gospel to our children.

No one but a fool is always right.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

I don’t believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

The idea that there is one kind of African is, of course, ridiculous. Sometimes African entrepreneurs want to kill you because you are saying public health is the priority, not roads. Of course they are right to press for that issue, but so are we right, I believe, to argue, for example, that millions of children could and should be vaccinated.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

I have spent so much time and so much energy making other people’s children stars.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn’t have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.

I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.

We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun- together.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

I want parents to teach that academic intelligence is essential, but so is financial intelligence.

Pfft, I hate Christmas Day. It’s for children and families. Not for people like me.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.

Children have always responded to me because I have that cartoon-character look.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

My biggest hobby is hanging out with my family and kids.

I’m sorry my existence is not very noble or sublime.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.