- The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
- Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
- The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
- The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
- I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
- You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that 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 ... people look at reality, then you can change it.
- That the western world has forgotten that such a thing as the moral choice exists, my history, my flesh and my soul bear witness.
- [in the run-up to the 1980 Presidential election] In a couple of days, blacks may be using the vote to outwit the Final Solution. Yes. The Final Solution. No black person can afford to forget that the history of this country is genocidal from where the buffalo once roamed to where our ancestors were slaughtered - from New Orleans to New York, from Birmingham to Boston, and to the Caribbean and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Saigon. Oh yes, let freedom ring.
- I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
- [on jazz] This music begins on the auction block.
- [observation, 1968] Sidney Poitier, as a black artist and a man, is up against the infantile, furtive sexuality of this country. Both he and Harry Belafonte are sex symbols, though no one dares to admit that, still less use them as any of the Hollywood he-men are used.
- American history is longer, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
- Our humanity is our burden, our life. We need not battle for it. We need only to do what is infinitely more difficult: that is, accept it.
- In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born, every stick and stone, every face is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.
- [on the history of African-Americans in the civil-rights movement] I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them too but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played - and play - in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.
- Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford.
- Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
- Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.
- People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.
- Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
- People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
- Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
- Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
- It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn't make a right, either. People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.
- Despair is a sin. I believe that. It is easy to be bleak about the human race, but there are people who have proved to me that we can be better than we are.
- You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
- Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
- The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.
- If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
- Without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure's inventions are soon exhausted. There must be a soul within the body you are holding, a soul which you are striving to meet, a soul which is striving to meet yours.
- If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
- I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.
- People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
- Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology ... because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.
- Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden. I wonder why.
- Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.
- People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
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