Quotes About Individuality

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.

In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.

For, you see, he had found his center, his own center, inside him: and it showed. He wasn't anybody's nigger. And that's a crime, in this fucking free country. You're suppose to be somebody's nigger. And if you're nobody's nigger, you're a bad nigger: and that's what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown.

You can't see yourself all over. But I can. Part of you is honey, part of you is copper, some of you is gold--

I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?

A man is not a man until he's able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.

and what in the world was I by now but an aging, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakably erratic freak?

The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors.

I am not trying to be méchant when I talk about women. I respect women—very much—for their inside life, which is not like the life of a man.

It doesn't do any good to blame people or the time-- one is oneself all those people. We are the time.

It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion.

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him--he may be forced to--but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.

I'm going to have my baby and I'm going to bring him up to be a man. And I ain't going to read to him out of no Bibles and I ain't going to take him to hear no preaching. If he don't drink nothing but moonshine all his natural days he be a better man than his Daddy.

It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence.

I think she's a beautiful woman. She may not be beautiful to look at whatever the fuck that means, in this kingdom of the blind.

Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all. That's the only advice you can give anybody. And it's not advice, it's an observation.

There is nothing more boring, anyway, than sexual activity as an end in itself, and a great many people who came out of the closet should reconsider.

It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.

People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes in a human face is the record of that collision.