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| America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description. | | America and Americans | |
| By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication. | | Uncategorized | |
| Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression. | | Music | |
| Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear. | | Uncategorized | |
| Education is all a matter of building bridges | | Education | |
| Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. | | Uncategorized | |
| Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. | | Uncategorized | |
| Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action. | | Uncategorized | |
| I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. | | Uncategorized | |
| I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. | | Uncategorized | |
| I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed. | | Grandparents; Slavery | |
| I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist. | | Uncategorized | |
| If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy. | | Uncategorized | |
| Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. | | Uncategorized | |
| Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it. | | Power | |
| Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values. | | Uncategorized | |
| The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. | | Writing | |
| The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas. Or, as Emerson insisted, the development of consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. | | Uncategorized | |
| The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing. | | Art | |
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