Eliminating one weakness is better than adding one strength.
That we arrived at fifty years together is due as much to luck as to love, and a talent for knowing, when we stumble, where to fall, and how to get up again.
The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, dignity.
You just try to do everything that comes up. Get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, make the time. Then you look back and say, ‘Well, that was a neat piece of juggling there -- school, marriage, babies, career. ’ The enthusiasms took me through the action, not the measuring of it or the reasonableness.
The greatest gift is not being afraid to question.
God, make me so uncomfortable that I will do the very thing I fear.
My dream was I was going to be an actor. Racism occurred to me. It dawned on me that I would not be an actor. It occurred to me that I was not white. It occurred to me that being what they call colored, being a Negro, was some kind of a disadvantage.
Our mental attitude transforms a situation into either a problem or an opportunity.
Publishing has gone very middlebrow. It's turned its back on legacy of modernism and gone into a humanist mode. When people go through art school they are exposed to the history of the avant-garde, and there's a general understanding that what you're doing as an artist is to a large extent, not just regurgitating that history, but engaging with it. There's this denial of that in the mainstream publishing world.
You can be careful as far as you can, but you never know when you're going to fall over and break your ankle. It's like when you drive a car, you don't think about crashing, do you?
After what seemed like an eternity, we finally reached the summit just as the sun was rising. I couldn't believe that we had actually done it. We were standing at the highest point in all of Africa, looking down at the clouds below us, with the sun directly in front of us, its rays welcoming us to the beginning of a new day. It didn't seem like this was something that humans were meant to experience, yet here we were