I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.

I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.

Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.

I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.

I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I'm trying to figure out what manliness really is.

Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That's the only thing.

Without love for my fellow man and respect for nature, to me, life is an obscenity.

Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.

take what you can from your dreamsMake them real as anythingIt takes the work out of the courage

Starting right now, attempt to live as if you have no regrets.

Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being

You've got to be in a position for luck to happen. Luck doesn't go around looking for a stumblebum.

People just want good stories.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

If you want a glory that does not vanish, then do not glory in a glory that vanishes

I spent seven months in Africa and came back saying there isn't anything you can say about black people that you couldn't say about, say, pink people except that they're black.

There is a little gland in the brain in which the soul exercises its functions in a more particular way than in the other parts.

The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.