When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

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

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.