Quotes on Literature

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

No one could ad lib like Peter. You would think that it was all scripted, he was so poetic, but it wasn't.

I was told to challenge every spiritual teacher, every world leader to utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: 'Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.