I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

I don’t need a successor, only willing hands to accept the torch for a new generation.

People want to listen to a message, word from Jah. This could be passed through me or anybody. I am not a leader. Messenger. The words of the songs, not the person, is what attracts people.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Faith activates God – Fear activates the Enemy.

My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

No man was ever wise by chance.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

I’ve conducted the Boston Pops! Imagine that! Me! Maya Angelou! I’ve sang and danced at La Scala!

When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish – people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people – and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

Life loves the liver of it.

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

I intend to inspire people with my story: motivate young people that grew up like myself, or even not like myself. Just, you know, go through the human experience.

I think a role model is a mentor – someone you see on a daily basis, and you learn from them.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

If you can talk, you can write.

Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.

Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

Now I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

I’m a big perfectionist! I’m trying to channel super-confident women like Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Beyonce, because I realized that if you want something, you really have to go for it, just like they do.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.