Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

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.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.