What I miss today more than anything else – I don’t go to church as much anymore – but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.
When I’m sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.
If I were to give one piece of advice, I would say to never accept anything that you hear or see at face value. As a general rule of thumb, then the more you question, the better.
How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?
I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn’t be the writing.
We looked at each other, and I could see in those big reddened eyes that he was not going to scream. He was full of anger – and who could blame him? – but he was no fool. He needed me, and he wanted me here, if only to insult me.
I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.
In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.
I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn’t novel.
A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they’re better than anyone else on earth – and that’s a myth.
Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free. Yes, they must believe, they must believe. Because I know what it means to be a slave. I am a slave.
I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.
I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.
If I ain’t nothing but trouble, you ain’t nothing but Nothing.
My master jecked up my dress and gived my mistress the whip and told her to teach me a lesson. Every time she hit me she asked me what I said my name was. I said Jane Brown. She hit me again: what I said my name was. I said Jane Brown.
We’ve only been living in these ghettos for seventy-five years or so, but the other three hundred years – I think this is worth writing about. I think we’ve made tremendous sacrifices, we’ve shown tremendous strength. In the ghetto you see a lot of frustration; you see very little strength.
I don’t care what a man is. I mean, a great artist is like a great doctor. I don’t care how racist he is. If he can show me how to operate on a heart so that I can cure a brother, or cure someone else, I don’t give a damn what the man thinks; he has taught me something. And that is valuable to me. And that is valuable to others and man as a whole.
That’s man’s way. To prove something. Day in, day out he must prove he is a man. Poor Fool.
We ain’t giving up,” I said. “We done gone this far.
I didn’t want to show it. Because if what he was saying was true, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Marshall was too big. If it was just Bonbon who wanted to hurt Marcus, you might be able to prevent that. Bonbon was nothing but a poor white man, and sometimes you could go to the rich white man for help. But where did you go when it was the rich white man? You couldn’t even go to the law, because he was the law. He was police, he was judge, he was jury.