If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.

The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.