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.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

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

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

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

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

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

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

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.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.