63 quotes
God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
Three Days Before the Shooting (2010)
Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove.
Invisible Man (1952)
Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
Three Days Before the Shooting (2010)
Words are everything and don't you forget it, ever.
Three Days Before the Shooting (2010)
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
Invisible Man (1952)
Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in.
The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
The Little Man at Chehaw Station (1978)
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize clear ideas.
Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
If the Twain Shall Meet (1964)
But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.
Invisible Man (1952)
The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.
Invisible Man (1952)
Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.
Invisible Man (1952)
I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open."
Invisible Man (1952)
Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
Invisible Man (1952)
Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "File and forget."
Invisible Man (1952)
I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Invisible Man (1952)
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke (1958)