Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!