People can cry much easier than they can change.

If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.

A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.