The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

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.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

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

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.