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.

I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed; all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.

He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.