The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

Recognizing a problem doesn't always bring a solution, but until we recognize that problem, there can be no solution.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.

It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.

Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.