A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching..

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal..

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors..

People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized acc….

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break fait….

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know..

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life..

We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until w….

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers..

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to ….

Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify ….

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms..

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours..

Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can ex….

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..

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others..

It comes as a great shock…to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance…has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock….

Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismis….

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..