The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.