I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do some….

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do n….

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books..

All literature is protest..

At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that ….

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust..

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.

I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em..

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented..

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow ….

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his f….

I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there was feeling denied me, that the very breath of life itself was bey….

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it.

We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land. We smelted iron, danced, made music and folk poems; we sc….

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like….

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human bein….

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...]..

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's ….

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital w….

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and ba….

It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and a….