I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

From my childhood I had been intended for the clergy. This prospect hung like a dark cloud on my mind.

Green Eggs and Ham was the story of my life. I wouldn’t eat a thing when I was a kid, but Dr. Seuss inspired me to try cauliflower!

There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand – good heavens! – that’s what I really call troublesome.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

Religion, any religion, no matter what sort of wonderful religion, never be universal. So now education is universal, so we have to sort of find ways and means through education system, from kindergarten up to university level, to make awareness these good things, the values, inner values.

When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: ‚I never want to be alone.‘ That’s what I would say. I don’t want to be alone.

My mom, she was a very, very soft woman. It was hard for her to yell or even curse. But when it came to fighting for her kids, she found a strength she didn’t always know she had.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

My grandmother used to embarrass me more, when she would pick me up from school wearing a big fuzzy hat. I didn’t like that.

My sisters like cooking at my place. It has a bit more room, and the food tastes a little bit better. A big pot of spaghetti and sauce, some warm French bread – works all the time. I think I’ve been eating pasta for 26 years.

You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too. That’s a part of it.

I refuse to feel guilty. I feel guilty about too much in my life but not about money. I went through periods when I had nothing, so somebody in my family has to get stinkin‘ wealthy.

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it’s how you recover from those failures – is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what you did wrong, and then you make it right. I say that to my kids every day.

I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly never wholly overcome me.

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.

The thing I want more than anything else? I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

I was a bit challenged when I was younger to stay on the right path.

No one can resist the idea of a crippled genius.

I’ve always felt heroic about my life… As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn’t think that was the case at all. My parents didn’t treat me as a girl.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don’t buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

But ever since I was a kid, I was always the winner.

Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.

I’ve got a woman’s ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it.

I was very worried about my mother, growing up – a lot. I do not want my children to be worried about me.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

When I was an orphan, I was the richest kid at the orphanage because everyone else was complaining about not having anything. But when I discovered that you could get two cents for a Coca-Cola bottle, I would follow people around who were drinking it and ask them if they were almost through with it.

Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don’t just succumb.

I’ve said this time and again: My greatest concern coming into the White House was making sure my girls came out whole and normal, and decent and kind, just like I would expect them to if we were living on the South Side of Chicago. And it takes work to keep White House life normal for the kids.

Whether you want to go into music, whether you want to be a lawyer, whether you want to be President of the United States, the bottom line for all of you is that you have got to get your education.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

I’m always happy to blow up any misconceptions that people have about stage school cos everyone thinks it’s really nasty there but it’s not.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

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

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.

It’s difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn’t available.

When my ancestors came from Africa, they were shackled by our neck, our wrists, and our ankles in steel chains. I’ve turned those steel chains into gold to symbolize the fact that I’m still a slave, only my price tag is higher.

I can’t jump the highest. I’m obviously not the biggest, not the strongest.

I think a father is important for everyone. If you don’t have, then maybe not so much. In the world today, it’s possible that you grow up with only one parent in the family.

My attitude has always been, if you fall flat on your face, at least you’re moving forward. All you have to do is get back up and try again.

I was very blessed to have family and friends, but particularly family, who told me I was not only all right, I was just right, so I believe that my brain is a good one, and it’s lasting me very well.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‚Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.‘

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

We need to understand that we as citizens and as a government in any community throughout this country have no more important obligation than to educate those who are going to replace us.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

When I was a youngster I lived with different families. I nearly always felt closer to the man of the house. Maybe because I always dreamed of having a father of my own.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people – one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion’s den. You can’t just play around with all those big cats – you’ve got to take somebody on.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

I’m not looking for sympathy at all.

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.