Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.

European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.