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. |
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. |
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression. |
Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression. |
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear. |
Education is all a matter of building bridges |
Education is all a matter of building bridges |
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. |
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. |
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action. |
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. |
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. |
I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed. |
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. |
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy. |