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 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'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.

Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.

The trick for introverts is to honor their styles instead of allowing themselves to be swept up by prevailing norms.

Consciousness is everywhere, let it fill you up.

You can't cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.

That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.

Humans were free before the word freedom became necessary.

Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.

I started realizing I have enough history that some of it has been forgotten.

Right now if you ask me Carmelo Anthony is GONE. He's going to L.A. to play w/Kobe Bryant.

Nutrition is not a mathematical equation in which two plus two is four. The food we put in our mouths doesn't control our nutrition-not entirely. What our bodies do with that food does.