Was it that she understood that we resented having others think that we were all entertainers and natural singers? But now after the mutual laughter something disturbed me: Shouldn't there be some way...
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
New York!" he said. "That's not a place, it's a dream.
When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happens to be looking through him...
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
So now they're shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth
Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.
I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid.
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were o...
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is,...
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads y...
But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase.
I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of...
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
Could he have meant—hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence. Did he me...
Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.
When we finally achieve the full right of participation in American life, what we make of it will depend upon our sense of cultural values, and our creative use of freedom, not upon our racial identif...