“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.”

I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.

Don’t leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.

Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . .

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness

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.

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.

I wish the music business was a much easier thing, but you know what? Nothing easy is worth anything. So it is what it is.

We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.

I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice – anything just to get a paper bag. And I’d write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook.

Don’t be too precious or attached to anything you write. Let things be malleable.

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.

If there’s anything a public servant hates to do it’s something for the public.

I ain’t a bit ashamed of anything.

No man does anything from a single motive.