Fiction writing is a political act

Stern light on everything that prohibits their attainment

Church (good and bad. It helps the people maintain their sanity.

A Toast Before Dying

Not Only write the truth about people but have selected people to write about whom one wants to know the truth.

Don't write about people without scruples, compassion, or any kind of humanity

We resonate with Dostoyevsky, Walter Lowenfels

How aptly and succinctly one can verbalize one's perceptions of totality

The responsibility of the writer is to use his tools in the highest service of life as he knows it to be, to scratch the scummy murk of lies, no matter how deep and how encrusted, to extend, to enlarge, to engage in the pursuit of deathlessness
        One does not ask if this is possible. One is driven on by this unquenchable desire for truth.
Blindingly. For if one stops to ask, to ponder, the energy is diminished, the pursuit is abandoned.
        I am speaking only for myself, to find oneself free, weightless, touching only those things that place on in a state of complete, comforting containment

Writers [illegible] to make reality more perceivable and attainable to us, move us further along the way to some grand enlightenment.
        Truth is life is beauty. Those soaring moments when we reach the truth. This high-keyed exhilarating yes, to perceiving the–

Why should the artist be committed to the truth?
Because in my view the artist is a shepherd that contributes toward leading people toward a better life, that helps people understand the nature of their problem, the nature of their society, the social relations, plumb infinite depths of the human psyche so that people may understand themselves and others. To hearten them, giving them courage by pointing out the amazing ability to overcome. In that way the artist does not describe life but is a partner with the people in the relentless pursuit of a truly humane existence.

Truth is empowering. I stand by the notion that the lifelong struggle of the artist is to deepen one's understanding of what the truth is and to deepen her capacity to [illegible] their insight. In other words, to perfect one's craft.

        With increasing frequency in the last two decades I have had occasions to feel the all-consuming desire to afford myself the luxury of expressing an outrageous and outraging contempt for the societal boundaries which constrict, circumscribe, and do one bang-up job of smothering the creative human impulse.
        Outrageous because the language would be far from polite, hence evoking the outrage at those to whom it would justly be directed: everybody who ever presented the creative artists with the following questions (and i mention but a few): Who appointed you? How long did it take you? What is this book all about? To answer the last first, I should just like to get my hands on the artists who dignify the last in submission to the instruction so often administered by the would-be purveyors of knowledge as to the hows and whats of the creative arts. At the simplest level of existence where one is engaged for the most part in non-combative enterprises. One does not go out the same door wherein one went contrary to the instruction of Kahil Gibran. It is for this reason I cannot take the attitude of despair as long as breath remains in perceiving body. For the creative artists this phenomena is so many more times so.

Why is required of me to be a poor imitation of a white woman?

Rockefeller is not likely to devise a method to overthrow capitalism

A character is typical and unique
The tree of universality has many branches. 3/4 of the earth's people are non-European...

To murder truth
To rend, to suffocate
To cut where quickness
Quivers, begging death of pain

I recalled the poetry reading last night. The recall at six o'clock this morning was so painful I awoke with woeful fatigue assaulting my entire body–especially my eyes–but it was so powerful and persistent that I am still awake trying to remember that vivid line someone read that was such a lie. I gasped for breath and am still gasping! I must recall that line. It was such an insult.

Fiction is more than a listing of facts. That is reportage, journalism. Fiction is larger. It reports that which can't be other.

Wage an assault on death. What are the conditions for life and all life-affirming and giving things? What does the work champion? Does it show the mistreatment of people is death-dealing?

Any piece of literature which indicts without qualifying its charge is guilty. It does not serve its readership well. Leaves the readership directionless. Communication is to activate.
        I am a writer, a woman, a mother who conceived children in the time-honored way of relating physically to my male counterpart.

Fiction raises–expands–the question from the personal to the universal. The questions it raises are universal. We see ourselves in similar circumstances, beginning for answers, fighting the eternal war of darkness for light. It asks the question of woe and it should appear to present the arguments for and against it. But always come out on the side of life. We see man in his eternal effort to hold on to and attach inheritance rights to that which is everybody's. This is basically corrupt. We must rearrange our notion of property. One cannot steal that which is everybody['s]. Fiction is always a struggle toward life. Even if we die we end up winning.

The antithesis of poetry is an instruction manual. A poem is the most highly charged of categories in literature. Words are means for a practical end. Image, metaphor, sound, texture are all a part of poems. Poems use words as ends. Poems have rhythms, patterns.
Good prose has the texture of imagery
Images reinforce each other. The element of sound is important in poetry. The poet works with sound almost like a musician works with notes.
The total meaning of a poem is always more than the sum of its concepts.

Poetry is my mind at rest on a sure and singing truth. It is not wasteful. Will not be in other than its place

Freedom is to dwell in one's soul
To be free in the Emily Dickenson sense is to be denied freedom as a lack of connectedness
Black writer is writing almost as in a foreign language