All racists are irresponsible..

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important..

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains..

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffer….

The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons..

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 ….

People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eatin….

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’….

Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you c….

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them..

The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory..

History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about..

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are..

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….

I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road l….

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed d….

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly..

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself..

Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do ….

I want to be an honest man and a good writer..

Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he'd been all hipped on the idea of going to India. He read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in al….