Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.