The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.

My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, "Whose little boy are you?"