Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the po...
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, t...
It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of t...
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink.
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. Ho...
An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world
Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.
Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
One must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion.
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit yo...
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous—dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
He had been bruised, so to speak, so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt.
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.