Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

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

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

All art is a kind of confession.

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.