At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.

There exists among the intolerable degraded, the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

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

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

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

I can't be a pessimist, because I am alive.