To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.
We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
No man is a devil in his own mind.
There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed ... But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.
Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.
The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.
In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.
Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
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