“I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely.”

She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.

The bewildered soul can answer only: “Since I do not understand ‘Who I am,’ I only know what I am not.” The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate.

The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.

If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.

I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.

Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.

Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.

Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.

In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.

Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss.

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who – one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.

This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings.

The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.

The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.

I want – I want – I want – was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know.

But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth?

Each year we send more and receive less.

You don’t get to know anybody in a movie until after it’s over. You work less together in a film than you do onstage.

Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable.

I wish I had spent more time at the office and less time in prison.

I couldn’t think of anything less appealing than molding the minds of tomorrow’s leaders.

Compared to the American public at large, probably a slightly higher percentage of journalists, because of thier enhanced power of discernment, realize they know a gay person or two, and are, therefore, less frightened of them.

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.

I don’t have a negative bone in my body. That’s why I could care less about any gossip. It doesn’t interest me. I’d rather sit down and write a song.