There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.