“I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.”

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 will say I am the sum of my books.

Consider what kind of car you get. Buy cars and other products that have the least impact environmentally.

Now, as smartphones are coming up, there are all kinds of apps that will start to be developed that will help women.

Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.

There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact.

Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, think. What delight God gives to humankind with all these things . All nature is at the disposal of humankind. We are to work with it. For without we cannot survive.

Get the better of yourself – this is the best kind of victory.

My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.

Understand: A person of power instills a kind of fear by deliberately unsettling those around him to keep the initative on his side.