“As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.”

Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.

All the things that were read to me by my father were stories about things becoming all right.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking.

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak. I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.

A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

My father was also interested in stocks. When I was a young child, he and his friends would drink in the evening and discuss about the stock market.

I’m gonna put a curse on you and all your kids will be born completely naked.

You don’t want to raise a kid in a culture where the kid who asks the most questions is annoying. You want a culture where the kid who asks the most questions gets awards and gets another piece of cake.

I think the Americans need to understand that a lot of times the children are bored in school, and that is why they are not staying in.

I will not be sued! I have the voice of an angel!

If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who’s coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.