You’ve got to bend with the wind or you’re broken.
There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.
Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That’s the only thing.
The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can’t have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.
Anytime a child is born, the old people look in his face and ask him if he’s the One.
He told us that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts.
I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I’m trying to figure out what manliness really is.
There will always be men struggling...
The mark of fear is not easily removed.
All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.
I think I’m a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don’t only believe in God, I know there’s God.
I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline.
We wait till now? Now, when we’re old men, we get to be brave?
I still don’t even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I’m still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?
Now, about that mulatto teacher and me. There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything. He hated me, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I didn’t like him, but I needed him, needed him to tell me something that none of the others could or would.
I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.
I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.
I write with as much objectivity as I can.
The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he’s less of a man. That’s just a condition of society that such things exist.
Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.