"When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave."

"But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns."

"The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also."

"The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition."

"I want to direct, produce, and write, learning as I go."

"Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word."

"I am very lucky, I have a very tight group of friends and a very supportive family, and to this date no-one has ever sold a story on me."

"The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others and finally for money."