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

In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.

The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.

Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.