Great art can only be created out of love.
If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.
It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
It is a terrible, an inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.
You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.