I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."

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.

Life must be live daringly.

No matter how dark the night may get, your light will never burn out.

The position of a hero is not for the comparision, it is a reference point

The reason why employee relations have lost its sheen in aiding productivity, is to be searched for, within the doors of your corporate structure, i.e. your human resource department.

I am very seldom interested in applications. I am more interested in the elegance of a problem. Is it a good problem, an interesting problem?

In this life, you have to risk big to win big.

Never look back; something is always gaining on you.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

I was leftwing, I am leftwing, and I will die leftwing.