The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.

Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.

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

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.