You might well remember that nothing can bring you success but yourself.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That's at the heart of 'J', a world that has stopped arguing with itself. We have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in 'J,' there's a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.