All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these d….

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge..

Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form...without light I am not only invisible but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to….

That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang..

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human faili….

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowl….

I am nobody but myself..

My hole is warm and full of light..

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical..

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like f….

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….

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 i….

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….

I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bea….

I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to w….

Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity..

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer..

You start Saul, and end up Paul,' my grandfather had often said. 'When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts t….

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 fai….

Our task, then always, is to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed manner and values of the few, and to struggle with it until i….

I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also….