In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.