"He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die."

"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent."

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."

"The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory."

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; Freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be."

"Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations."

"Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours."

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone... they will be forced to deal with pain."

"When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living."

"The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

"Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance."

"Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden."

"Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."

"It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian."

"It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless."

"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."

"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

"If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not."

"The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land."

"We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours."

"Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt."

"The future is like heaven - everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now."

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."

"The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

"The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible."

"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story."

"But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power."

"The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black."

"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."

"Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities."

"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone."

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."

"I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all."

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."

"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

"Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field."

"Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance."

"There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention."

"One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return."

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses"

"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up"

"The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did--which was to hide."

"I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

"It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."

"It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

"People can cry much easier than they can change."

"People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned."