Education is all a matter of building bridges..

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged gra….

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity..

The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it..

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains..

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers..

And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others..

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed..

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, un….

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by..

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority..

I blundered into writing..

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead..

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?.

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 sacri….

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'.

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy..

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question..

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 t….

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..