I have T.V. on all the time when I'm writing. I have music on. I'm engaged with the world.

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.

As a child I would play with such imagination that the ‘real’ world was never real at all. It was full of mystery, adventure and possibility.

But I value their hatred. I find it very useful. You see, people are always at their weakest when they're angry.

No one has ever proved that a human being, through his descent from a certain group of people, must of necessity have certain mental characteristics.

See karma, make dharma

Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the United States are going to absolute ruin.

We don't have enough money to rebuild our own country if we're rebuilding everyone else's countries.

Then I strip the pants away from each leg, like peeling a banana. That's it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana.

Make haste” Jane added, just because she always wanted to say that.

Death is much simpler than birth; it is merely a continuation. Birth is the mystery, not death.

You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.