I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?

Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

What I miss today more than anything else - I don't go to church as much anymore - but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.

I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.