But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he — Ralph Ellison

"[T]here must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale."

"By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication."

"Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty."

"Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers lifes crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart."

"Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.[…] For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison and destroy."

"[T]he painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in ones aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically."