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.

When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible,…

I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any …

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent - which attitude cer…

You advise me, too, not to stray far from the ground of experience, as I become weak when I enter the region of fiction; and you say, 'real experience is peren…

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth:but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.