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.

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

All literature is protest.

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

It’s not reality that makes people happy

Invest your life into what you were born to do. Make every minute of your life count. Redeem every minute of your life and convert it into greatness.

You may receive a pie, eat it and forget. You may receive champagne, drink it and forget. But when you receive a book, you can open it again and again.

Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.

He's not a lad that likes to stand on his feet.

If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species.

...as soon as the war was over, they had to justify what was done.

Everybody is a True Believer. Everybody has a little nugget they're convinced of that is the opposite of the nugget on the other side. And they're convinced it's fact.

Every audition that I walk out of where I think I nailed it, I never get that job, ever.

I may be the only golfer never to have broken a single putter, if you don't count the one I twisted into a loop and threw into a bush.