Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression.

What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.

History has shown that the less people read, the more books they buy.