It's not that I'm a very good person. It's that I think I should at least look at the ways in which I am not a good person, the ways in which I so readily become the person who would not notice that the wonderful clothing I'm wearing someone is probably dying for.

I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

Once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.