"But the moment he makes the attempt his words falter, for he is confronted and defied by the inexplicable array of hi…"

"I sensed, too, that the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more …"

"It was this intolerable sense of feeling and understanding so much, and yet living on a plane of social reality where…"

"But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives…"

"And in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American "cult…"

"I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore…"

"And then, while writing, a new and thrilling relationship would spring up under the drive emotion, coalescing and tel…"

"I don't know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don't know if the book I'm working on now will be a go…"

"And still when the delicate and unconscious machinery of race relations slips, there will be murder again. How can la…"

"The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-gen…"