Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

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

We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go.

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