The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
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.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
