I think people are willing to talk about anything if you come to it with kindness.

In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.

When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.

I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

I don't want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is.

Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.

My mom was very strict. And we were very religious. So I knew that I was not allowed to do the wrong thing. And I knew that I had a home I could run to. And I had a mom.

To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.

I'm fascinated by adult women who don't have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you're a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you're so connected to your girls, so what becomes of them? What could possibly happen to have you become an adult woman and no longer have that?

My mom was a big fan of Al Green... James Brown we weren't allowed to listen to, so of course I knew James Brown.

The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.

I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.

I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.

I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'

I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!

I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.

I didn't know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with 'Another Brooklyn.'

I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.

I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.

Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.

Even if the flower is no more, still, the fragrance can be.

Trees are our closest relatives. What trees exhale, we inhale; what we exhale, they inhale. They are half our respiratory system.

Communism is a way of thinking. Socialism is wimpy communism. When you don't have the courage to become a communist, you become a socialist.

A guru is like a live road map. If you want to walk uncharted terrain, I think it is sensible to walk with a road map.

Success means at least you are finding full potential to who you are in terms of your intelligence, your capability and competence: you are finding full expression to who you are. This is important.

A beard doesn't grow only on gurus; it grows on all men.

My vision for the country is to urbanise rural areas. What is available in the cities must be available in the villages.

You can learn to prevent a storm, or you can learn to ride the storm. If you learn to ride the storm, the storm is not a problem anymore.

The reason for fasting is to understand the relationship between what's you and what's the accumulative body.

When the Divine descends, you just accommodate.

Insight essentially means being able to see things other people are not able to see. This is the hallmark of leadership.

The purpose of life is to explore one's own life to its fullest, to explore all dimensions.

The most fundamental strength of India is that we are a land of seekers. Seekers of truth and liberation. Not a land of believers. We are a godless nation.

For most human beings, if what they want happens, it is a success. If what they could not have imagined happens, it is luck. If what nobody could foresee happens, it is a miraculous existence.

Essentially, all life on the planet is coming from the earth. Whether it is a human being or an earthworm, it is the same soil.

If you don't have the necessary inner balance, leadership can demolish you. Today, if you are a CEO by the time you are 35, you must have ulcers. By 45, you must have diabetes. By 55, you must have had a bypass. People say they have had three bypasses, as if it is a qualification.

Yoga is not a practice - the word 'yoga' means union. It does not mean standing on your head, twisting your body, or holding your breath. Yoga means to know the union of life. When you experience everything as a part of yourself, you are in yoga.

To make any endeavor truly successful, integrity, inspiration, and insight are integral.

If you ask across the section of farmers in the country how many of them want their children to go into farming, believe me, it is less than 10 per cent. Nobody wants their children to go into farming.

Vijji was not an accomplished yogi. She did what she did with just the sheer intensity of her emotions.

I don't have to go to a mountain to meditate. I'm meditative in every moment of my life.

'Belief' means something that you do not know. You want to assume and bring a certainty to something that you do not know. That means you are concretising your ignorance. There is no need to believe anything.

I speak passionately. I drive passionately. If I hit a ball, I will do it passionately, too. Because I don't understand how you go through life without involvement. Whatever I am doing in my life, whether big or small, I am 100 per cent involved.

Work has become like prison because of the way we treat it. If you are trapped with people who you do not care for, it feels like a concentration camp.

Discrimination will impair democracy.

What was earth, we made into filth. We must at least be able to transform it back to earth.