“When I was twenty-seven, the stock-market crash came. When I was twenty-eight my personal crash came. Then I guess I woke up. So, when I was almost thirty, I began to make my living from writing.”

Remembering personal and economic crisis as a turning point towards a life of writing · Autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander

• Art
• Memory
• Time

“Most of my life from childhood on has been spent moving, traveling, changing places, knowing people in one school, in one town or in one group, or on one ship a little while, but soon never seeing most of them again.”

Describing a life characterised by movement, brief encounters and repeated departures · Autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander

• Memory
• Solitude
• Time

“One can admit one was wrong. One can say “I think differently now.”

Affirming the possibility of intellectual change without pretending the past did not happen · Senate testimony, 1953

• Time
• Truth

“One can not go back and change anything one has done in the past.”

A sober acknowledgement of the permanence of past actions · Senate testimony, 1953

• Memory
• Time

“A bar of music out of context does not give you the idea of the whole thing.”

Using music to illustrate the danger of judging fragments without their larger context · Senate testimony, 1953

• Music
• Truth

“Whether or not I meant them depends on what they came from and out of.”

Insisting that words and intentions cannot be separated from their origins and context · Senate testimony, 1953

• Art
• Truth

“A critical work goes out of a very deep background, it does not come in a moment.”

Emphasising the accumulated experience behind serious artistic or critical expression · Senate testimony, 1953

• Art
• Memory

“I never read the theoretical books of socialism or communism or the Democratic or Republican party for that matter.”

Distinguishing his personal responses to injustice from systematic political theory · Senate testimony, 1953

• Truth

“I want to make my country as beautiful as I can, as wonderful a country as I can, because I love it myself.”

Connecting criticism of society with a desire to improve what one loves · Senate testimony, 1953

• Beauty
• Hope

“My feeling was this is my country, I want to live here.”

A simple assertion of belonging despite criticism and conflict · Senate testimony, 1953

• Hope
• Truth

“I loved the country I had grown up in. I was concerned with the problems and I came back here.”

Expressing attachment to his country alongside a determination to confront its problems · Senate testimony, 1953

• Hope
• Truth

“Those things affected my childhood very much and very deeply.”

Acknowledging how early experiences continued to shape his outlook · Senate testimony, 1953

• Childhood
• Memory

“It was my first revelation of the division between the American citizens.”

Recalling an early awareness of racial division in American life · Senate testimony, 1953

• Childhood
• Memory
• Truth

“I would much rather preserve my reputation and freedom than to save time.”

Placing personal integrity and liberty above convenience · Senate testimony, 1953

• Truth

“I, sir, was born in Joplin, Missouri. I was born a Negro.”

Stating plainly the identity and circumstances from which much of his experience arose · Senate testimony, 1953

• Memory
• Truth

“To give a full interpretation of any piece of literary work one has to consider not only when and how it was written, but what brought it into being.”

Arguing that literature must be understood through the circumstances that produced it · Senate testimony, 1953

• Art
• Truth

“It is impossible to say exactly when one changes one's views. One's views change gradually, sir.”

Recognising that changes of conviction usually happen gradually rather than at a single moment · Senate testimony, 1953

• Time
• Truth

“It seems to perpetuate almost all of the old stereotypes that have been used for many years to caricature the Negro people.”

Rejecting stereotyped representation in literature written for children · Letter to Alan Green, 1 July 1944

• Art
• Childhood
• Truth

“Around the world—even in places where there is almost nothing—the rich, the beautiful, the talented, or the very clever can always get something.”

Observing how privilege persists even amid general scarcity · Autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander

• Truth

“I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing.”

Maintaining that genuine creative work cannot simply obey an ideological programme · Autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander

• Art
• Truth

“Both of them were very good and kind—the one who went to church and the one who didn't.”

Remembering goodness as something not confined to religious observance · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Faith
• Memory

“The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.”

Compressing the unequal effects of economic hardship into a memorable observation · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Despair
• Truth

“I felt very bad in Washington. I didn't like my job, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and I was cold and half-hungry, so I wrote a great many poems.”

Remembering how hardship became a powerful stimulus to writing · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Despair
• Poetry

“I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books.”

Recalling books as an imaginative refuge during a lonely childhood · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Art
• Childhood
• Solitude