The Sound and the Fury

"When I first came East I kept thinking You've got to remember to think of them as colored people not niggers, and if it hadn't happened that I wans't thrown with many of them, I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. That was when I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among." William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, p. 86