Employment is my right my destiny.

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.