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

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….

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

In order to travel far you have to be detached..

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

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….

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….

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

Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs--which we ign….

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

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

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?.

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….

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 clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled..

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..

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own..

Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression..

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

Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action..

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….