“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

The impossible is the least that one can demand.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

You write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.