Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to get insulted.
It is when you are angry that you must watch how you talk.
I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.
Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
Something that is yours forever is never precious
I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.
It is for the artist. . . in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.
The trouble is that America's become a utopia accessible only to some people. Others get trampled on. Perhaps it's a problem of size. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist, once gave the ideal number of a given community as 148. That seems about right to me. There's something idealistic about that - in a group of 148 people you can get to know everybody.
Good writers will, indeed, do well to imitate the ingenious traveller. . . who always proportions his stay in any place.
No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.