Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more pre...
There was about his elders an ease in the holy place, and a levity, that made his soul uneasy.
The things that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally,...
Social affairs are not generally speaking the writer’s prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which w...
Large part of her simplicity consisted in determining not to want what she could not have with ease. So
He was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.
Consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
Civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
But what men imagine they are doing and what they are doing in fact are rarely the same thing.
You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.''I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.
You can talk about doing a thing until everyone finally talks you out of it or you can actually do the thing.
Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arriv...
With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.
With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the Africa...
What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers, because you bel...
We’re getting old, he thought, and it damn sure didn’t take long.
Well, hell, if people keep telling you you ain’t no good’ - she [Leona] tried to laugh - ‘you bound to turn out pretty bad.
We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God’s name. This, then, is the...
Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!