Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

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.

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

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.