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The function of freedom is to free someone else.

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This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You...more

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There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizat...more

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I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing wa...more

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I get angry about things, then go on and work.

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Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

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I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ours...more

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I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but th...more

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The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with whic...more

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All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschy...more

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I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped...more

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Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

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She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pit...more

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They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddenly the world was right side up. Violet learned then what she had forgotten until...more

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See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind yo...more