“If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.”

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

How false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don’t know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.

Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.

Anybody who perceives colors can become a painter. It’s simply a question of whether or not one has felt anything and whether one has the courage to recount the things one has felt.

Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.

Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

We don’t hate nobody because of their color. We hate oppression!