Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...
The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
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.
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].
Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.
All literature is protest.
It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.
If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
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.
I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...
Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!
But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.
Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.
Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.
There are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed
Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.
You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man...
Held at bay by the hate of others, preoccupied with his own feelings, he was continuously at war with reality.
My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of teror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.
... a knowledge of how to live was a knowledge of how to die.
How could one find out about life when one was about to die?
Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.
...it was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; it was a simple, urgent matter of public pride, a matter of how much I had in common with other people.
The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted.
The world of most men is given to them by their culture..
....I wondered if there had been a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.
Men are inventing ideas every day to justify for themselves and others their actions and needs.
You look like an accident going somewhere to happen
So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting.
Would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger of life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human
You can't make me do nothing but die!
If you posses enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.
...to see was not to control, that self-understanding was far short of self-mastery. He was afraid of himself.
Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires
Having been thrust out of the world because of my race, I had accepted my destiny by not being curious about what shaped it
And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.
They argued about the weather, sports, sex, war, race, politics, and religion; neither of them knew the subjects they debated, but it seemed that the less they knew the better the could argue.
Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.
He sat. The white cat still contemplated him with large, moist eyes.
A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man's consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars.
Absolute power is corrupting
I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.
He had been defeated by that which he had sought to destroy.
Then, first of all, let us admit that there is no such thing as objectivity, no such objective fact as objectivity. Objectivity is a fabricated concept, a synthetic intellectual construction...
In the old days we were concerned with mobs, with thousands of men running amuck in the streets. The mob has conquered completely. When the mob has grown so vast that you cannot see it, then it is everywhere.
Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality. --Richard Wright to William Faulkner
