I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.

The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.

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.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.