 Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. |
| The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly. |
| The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone. |
| The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him. |
| An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience. |
| It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless. |
| Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities. |
| The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land. |
| But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power. |
| It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian. |
| The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black. |
| We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours. |
| It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. |
| The paradox of education is precisely this; that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. |
| If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not. |
