The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life. - Ralph Ellison

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought — to lose your direction is to lose your face.

And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel—and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?—is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.