“I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

Everybody’s journey is individual.

I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another’s learning.

The most indespensible ingredient of all good home cooking: love for those you are cooking for.

I never thought of myself as being handsome or good-looking or whatever.

Nothing more aggravates ill success than the near approach of good.

I hate a liar. Maybe because I’m such a good one myself, heh? Anyway, to find someone has told an out and out lie puts him on the other side of the fence from me for all time.

We have to make good use of the time we have. That simple. We have to wake up every day, knowing that it’s not just an ordinary day. We have to take the moment, seize each day.

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

Both of them were very good and kind – the one who went to church and the one who didn’t. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well.