After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden - as an unpatriotic act - that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.