The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

To hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first . . . acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are [;] . . . the second . . . that one must never, in one's life, accept . . . injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.

The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art