We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
Writing is a political instrument.
At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.
It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.
She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn’t a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.
Whose little boy are you?
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years.
The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.
If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.