Our highest ambition is to be included in the stream of American life, to be permitted to "play the game" as any other American; and is opposed to anything that aids in the exclusion; the face may be Africa, but the heart has the beat of Wall Street.

When you get to mixing sex and religion, it will make anybody crazy.

I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.

There is an indomitable quality within the human spirit that cannot be destroyed; a face deep within the human personality that is impregnable to all assaults.

Martyrs are needed to create incidents. Incidents are needed to create revolutions. Revolutions are needed to create progress.

American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

It seemed so illogical to punish some poor criminal for doing something that civilization taught him how to do so he could have something that civilization taught him how to want. It seemed to him as wrong as if they had hung the gun that shot the man.