But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.