If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

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.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent humanity, the mark of cruelty.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.