The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

Don't leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

All literature is protest.

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.

Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.

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.

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.

Dead men tell no tales, Mary.

Whatever shall be to the advantage of all, may that prevail!

Like I said, all comedy is based on exaggeration, big or small, whatever you can get away with.

There are two emotions: love and fear.

Nothing is so atrocious as fancy without taste.

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn't like. It has no resemblance to democracy.

A satyagrahi is sometimes bound to use language which is capable of two meanings, provided both the meanings are obvious and necessary and there is no intention to deceive anyone.

I am thinking of you in my sleepless solitude tonight.

At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist, and art, as Aristotle said, 'completes what nature left unfinished.'