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

Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.