For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.
The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.
It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go somewhere else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled.
Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.
There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.
A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Great art can only be created out of love.
We can make America what America must become.
All racists are irresponsible.
I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.
There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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