What you are will make you what you will become.

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black.

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind - -vividly, forcefully.

'You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we . . .' She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. 'We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!'

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.