Richard Wright

“Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight...”

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.”

“They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged.”

“All my life had been a hunger for words.”

“I was not leaving the South to forget the South, but so that some day I might understand it.”

“The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.”

“Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed... It is not a strategy for social transformation.”

“The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.”

“I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off.”

“Love grows from security.”

“If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.”

“I did not know if the story was useless, if it was pointless. But I did know that I must write it.”

“Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is insecure, must acquire vigor and wisdom before it can decay.”