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.

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.