The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

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

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

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.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

Fonny and I just sat there... while the voices of the congregation rose and rose around us, without mercy... Teddy had the tambourine, and gave the cue to the piano player-I never got to know him: a long dark, evil-looking brother, with hands made for strangling; and with these hands he attacked the keyboard like he was beating the brains out of someone he remembered. No doubt the congregation had their memories, too, and they went to pieces. The church began to rock.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.