"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers."

"If I am not what I’ve been told I am, then I’m not what you think I am."

"It is a great shock to discover that the world, which one always thought of as an adult world, is not adult at all; it is a world of children, all of whom are playing very complicated games, which the…"

"One writes out of one thing only: one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one has examined one’s experience."

"The great difficulty, and that which makes the American Negro's experience unique, is that he has been forced to make his journey alone."