Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things which tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.