People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

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.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.