Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.

To say goodbye is to die a little.

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

I'm killing time and it's dying hard.

The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me.

You like it in jail?""It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?

You like it in jail?It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?

You like it in jail?''It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?

One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.

A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be...

I'm a survivor and I can handle anything. I'm very confident about that.

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

When there's a piano to be moved, don't reach for the stool.

I want to make a difference with people who want to make a difference, doing something that makes a difference.

Oh, I didn't think it wise to hide it. Might not be able to find it again," I say, cheerily. "It's sitting in plain view on your chair in the great hall. I do hope that was the best place for it.

Dreams don't have deadlines. Believe in yourself.

In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.

There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy... the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul... the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.