You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.