“New York!" he said. "That's not a place, it's a dream.”

“a delegate shout out from the floor: Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes...”

“Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.”

“It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they wer...”

“The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.”

“You're a Black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it b...”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“Semua orang pernah patah hati. All you have to do is move on.”

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.”

“If you only write when youre inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but youll never be a novelist because youre going to have to make your word count today and those words arent going to wait fo...”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”