Artists are here to disturb the peace.
Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head.
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.
To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.