“It ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under.”

“Yet it is only when one is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream one has long cherished, or a privilege one has long possessed, that one is set free…that one has set oneself free, for higher dreams, for greater privileges. James Baldwin”

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”

“Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.”

“And yet - when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds one-self pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors.”

“The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.”

“One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”