All literature is protest.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it

They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.

Do your thing, without harming anything.

This age is interested in success, not suffering . . . Our Lord was ridiculed, insulted, persecuted, and eventually killed. In the face of opposition, He went about “doing good.

It is a sin to be poor.

Retirement from work has depressed many a man and hastened his death.

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

My answers have been prayered.

I don't have any of the answers, son. Never did. All I can do is keep asking the questions. Keep trying to make sense of why people do what they do.

Rio would be my last Olympics.

When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.