The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow but a boomerang.
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
The antidote to hubris to overweening pride is irony that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.
And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I and only I could answer.
I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed
To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
In order to travel far you have to be detached.
God is love I said but art's the possibility of forms and shadows are the source of identity.
I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident self-assuring self-starting and self-stopping self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it you know it.
And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Power for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.
It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.
I am nobody but myself.
The blues is an art of ambiguity an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances whether created by others or by one's own human failing.
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.
I feel the need to reaffirm all of it the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it for it is all part of me.
Had the price of looking been blindness I would have looked.
the world is just as concrete ornery vile and sublimely wonderful as before only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free it has also the power to bind imprison and destroy.
Education is all a matter of building bridges.
I am invisible understand simply because people refuse to see me.
I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance of flesh and bone fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible understand simply because people refuse to see me.
Man's hope can paint a purple picture can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good"?only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.
Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties I must come out I must emerge.
If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.
Life is as the sea art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness reducing it to a course a series of swells tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise and we chose rather desperately to live.
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
The clock ticked with empty urgency as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.
Every serious novel is beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations a discussion of the craft a conquest of the form a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.
Life is to be lived not controlled and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
I do not know if all cops are poets but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Please a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
When I discover who I am I'll be free.
The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.
America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one and yet many. This is not prophecy but description.
We don't all dig Shakespeare uniformly or even 'Little Red Riding Hood.' The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him I play by ear.
What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.
Imitation is suicide envy is ignorance.
My hole is warm and full of light.
Who knows but that on the lower frequencies I speak for you?
Without the possibility of action all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'
Meaning grows in the mind but the shape and form of the act remains.
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
I blundered into writing.
Without involvement there is no commitment. Mark it down asterisk it circle it underline it." Stephen Covey "It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.
...and yet I am what they think I am.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free it has also the power to blind imprison and destroy.
Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.
Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached and I had the long road back to the campus before me.
Words are your business boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock the answer to the question.
If social protest is antithetical to art what then shall we make of Goya Dickens and Twain?
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.
Good fiction is made of that which is real and reality is difficult to come by.
It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.