The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

When Americans look out on the world, they see nothing but dark and menacing strangers who appear to have no sense of rhythm at all, nor any respect or affection for white people; and white Americans really do not know what to make of all this, except to increase the defense budget.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.