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.
There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.
It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.
Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.
The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life – without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.
Man cannot live by profit alone.