Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.

Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.