Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

A relationship with young people is very important to me. It's important to have a sense of what's going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is a gift.

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.

If you want to do things, do things.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.

What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

The word career is a divisive word. Its a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

Hindsight usually looked down upon is probably as valuable as foresight since it does include a few facts.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.

A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide.

Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources. In desperate straits the fears of the timid aggravate the dangers that imperil the brave.

I know that if I'd had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn't have got anywhere. You don't take exams for acting, you take your courage.

Necessity does the work of courage.

Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

More firm and sure the hand of courage strikes, when it obeys the watchful eye of caution.

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.

The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, dignity.

Ronald Reagan's well documented final battles with Alzheimer's disease were fought with the same conviction and courage that his many public battles were fought.

On sensitive issues, talk isn't cheap - it takes real courage to pry open topics nailed shut.

An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.

There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.

It is up to African leaders to show their will and political courage in order to assure that this new pan-African institution becomes an efficient instrument and not a place for endless discussions.

Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline; simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness postulates strength.

It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor. Live bravely and present a brave front to adversity.

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

Is he alone who has courage on his right hand and faith on his left hand?