The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.

There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.

To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.