Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have ….

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours..

Hatred destroys the person who hates..

A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do..

We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revoluti….

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t wan….

No man is a devil in his own mind..

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. ….

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back..

Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because….

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition..

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to wha….

The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in ….

God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead..

White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will….

Such figures as Boy George do not disturb me nearly so much as do those relentlessly hetero (sexual?) keepers of the keys and seals, those who know w….

Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head.

People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about ….

Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair..

I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am r….

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music e….