“Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.”

The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.

Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

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.

I am an invisible man. 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.

I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.