There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature--poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We sho...
There is a belief advanced today, and in some cases by conservative black authors, that poor children and particularly black children should not be allowed to hear too much about these matters. If they learn how much less they are getting than rich c...
I'm a woman; in so many ways I've been programmed to please. I took the job and spent time hunkered over figures, budgets, charts, and fiscal-year projections. I tried, but I hated it. "Working at a job you don't like is the same as going to prison e...
My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened an...
The day I became a writer it wasn't the day a whore paid me in sex in exchange for one of my books which happened often and more and more as time went on it wasn't the first time someone actually paid for one of my books which happens less and less a...
Through life, I want to walk gently. I want to treat all of life – the earth and its people – with reverence. I want to remove my shoes in the presence of holy ground. As much as possible, I want to walk in peace. I want to walk lightly, even joy...
Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride ...
Joseph Goebbels: [in German; subtitled] How many seats in your auditorium? Francesca Mondino: [translates into French] Shosanna Dreyfus: [in French; subtitled] Three hundred and fifty. Francesca Mondino: [translates into German] Joseph Goebbels: That...
Ernestine used to remark, in a tone tinged with envy, that Lill was probably New Jersey's youngest gold digger, and that few adult gold diggers ever had received more, in return for less.
There are few things less comforting than a tiger who's been up too late.
This is what progress does, you know. Each step into the future makes us ever so much grander and more demanding and thus ever so slightly less human.
I knew the end would come, one day. I knew my life deserved to be over. Yet, even knowing that, I was no less fearful.
Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.
The conventional parabola--sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness--was to him shameful and hypoc...
Soon as you ask someone how they are and they give you a hint of mediocrity or less, say, 'The Universe wants you to know that I love you.
Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.
And his eyes were fluttering shut, and his sinner’s smile- that wickedly wondrous thing- was less than an inch from mine. And soon enough, there was no space between them at all. He tasted like chances.
...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.
All people are standing; you got to standout! All people are breaking grounds; you got to breakthrough grounds! Don't settle for less; rise up and stand tall in what you do!
We are what we are. Nothing more, nothing less. There is good and evil among every kind of people. It's the evil among us who rule now.
There were a few nighttime pedestrians on the block, but they continued on their way, dutifully ignoring the zombie vomiting blood out of the back of my car. Good old New Yorkers. They really couldn't care less.
