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

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

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

All literature is protest.

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

To be successful you have to be dumb enough to think you can change the world and smart enough to know how.

You know, in my hometown of Hope, Arkansas, the three sacred heroes were Jesus, Elvis, and FDR, not necessarily in that order.

All those rumors about her being underweight are trash. She's [Calista Flockhart] gorgeous.

Life does not stand still. Where there is no progress, there is disintegration.

You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.

You menace others with your deadly fangs. But in tormenting them, you are only tormenting yourselves.

God is not the author of all things, but of good only.

Trouble is said to be good for an artist's soul but almost never is.

The constitutional reform is supposed to give autonomy to eastern Ukraine and to be adopted by the end of 2015. This has not happened, and the year is over. That's not Russia's fault.

I envy the people who say, 'oh, well, I've got my name in the golden book and I'm going to be entered into the pearly gates.'