Anger Is A Wasted Emotion.

Misery Won't Touch You Gentle. It Always Leaves Its Thumbprints On You; Sometimes It Leaves Them For Others To See, Sometimes For Nobody But You To Know Of.

We Need Literature Because We Wouldn’t Fully Know Ourselves Without It. We Need Good Literature To Be Fully Human.

That Experience Of Touching Down In A Totally Foreign Place Is Like Having A Blank Canvas: You Begin With Nothing, But Stroke By Stroke You Build A Life. This Process Requires Everything Great Art Requires-risk-tasking, Hope, A Great Deal Of Imagination, All The Qualities That Are The Building Blocks Of Art. You Must Be Able To Dream Something Nearly Impossible And Toil To Bring It Into Existence.

Aids Was Something That Was Put Upon Us [as Haitians], And We Were Immediately Identified With It. That Is Unfair. That Is Unjust. I Always Say, "we Are All People Living With Aids." It's Not Like You Can Avoid It. It's Part Of Our World.

My Models Were Oral, Were Storytellers. Like My Grandmothers And My Aunts. It's True, A Lot Of People In My Life Were Not Literate In A Formal Sense, But They Were Storytellers. So I Had This Experience Of Just Watching Somebody Spin A Tale Off The Top Of Her Head. I Loved That.