The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.

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.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.