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.

I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.

A number of things in Dhalgren are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.

Now for me, you're the irreplaceable one: I've never see you up so close before, and I do not understand you at all. You say sometimes I act like I don't see you? I don't even know where to look! Living with you around is like is like living with a permanent dazzle. The fact that you even like me, or look at me, or brush by me, or hug me, or hold me, is so surprising that after it's over I have to go back through it a dozen times in my head to savor it and try and figure out what it was like because I was too busy being astounded while it was happening.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.