History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

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

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.