“Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it.”

It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

Kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.

All literature is protest.

Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible… Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world.

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged.

It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

The locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the ells and the screams that filled the air.

No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like livin’ in jail.

I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

Know what you value, be willing to take a risk, and lead from the heart – lead from what you believe in.

It is not permissible for us to go on destroying the family life when we know that we are destroying it.

I know there’s an online petition to have another referendum [like Brexit] but I think honestly I think if people want to go for it a little further down the line it would be a hiding for nothing.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

The Hasidic rabbi, Zuscha, was asked on his deathbed what he thought the kingdom of God would be like. He replied, “I don’t know. But one thing I do know.

The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.

I know what’s good for me. I can’t play black or gray. I can’t be a villain or anything close to one. I have to play white.

Maybe I can’t act, but I know the gimmicks. I studied acting all my life and know what’s good for me.