Free enterprise is not a bad idea and has produced art.

I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.

Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."

I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.

History was what had happened

It's an ember forever burning in my heart. It's a reminder Caleb will live forever.

The more sincere the soul, the heavier the cross endured.

Your mind and habits will create either barriers or bridges to a better future.

Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

Hard times build determination and inner strength. Through them we can also come to appreciate the uselessness of anger.

It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot.

Women's Day Women are the real architects of society.

They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.

I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.