I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

I had a deep prejudice against the South. It's taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.

You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.

All Stories are True.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.

HE wants you to feel HIM in any possible way you can, but you lazy bird, come on, make a step and you will feel all you got to feel.

The only place you will find love before sacrifice is in the dictionary.

Well, I just want him to grow up happy. That's the main thing.

The Grammys used me for ratings. And they were up 18 percent!

Do you have any ambitions outside racing? My main ambition at the moment, whether inside or outside racing, is to become Formula 1 World Champion.

I'm sorry I didn't feel any better or play any better, but that's what happens at the end of careers.

With guys I revere, like Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X, their look is less about style than purpose and the expression of beauty. It wasn't just about being noticed, you know?

Desegregation is a joke.

It has become quite a common proverb that in wine there is truth (In Vino Veritas).

Ive written a book on gangs, taught a course on gangs at Occidental.