One of the things I'm going to say out there is how grateful I am - and how grateful the world is - for the tremendous gift of the black people, of jazz.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

We are America's Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines.

Ideas on earth were badges of friendship or enimity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enimity.

God damn it, you've got to be kind.