I'm not good enough as a person and definitely not good enough as a writer.

I'm also, than anything else, a teacher and a student. And without the four hours, I'm pretty monsterish. For real.

Black is not a vice. Nor is segregation a virtue.

I'm an obsessive writer who needs and loves revision. Writing helps me learn and helps me teach.

I'm a black writer from Mississippi. That's what I most consider myself.

I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.

I'm interested in how the confessional is so abrasively critiqued today. I'm not really comfortable with simply confessing but I do think "confessing" is a major part of reckoning.

Long Division has a lot of Afrosurrealist impulses. I think the book was more Afrofuturist when it was like 700 pages.

We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.

Obama will win. We will win. Then we will continue to lose. And the right questions will never be honestly asked or answered, and it's all just too much.

Your letter reminds me that any love that necessitates deception is not love. It doesn't matter if that supposed love is institutional or personal.

Because you can only die once but you can suffer forever.

And why does he talk so funny? Doesn't he mean squashed tomatoes?I don't think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that's just how they talk then.

Saying something is 'politically correct' is often a way of dismissing the voices of the oppressed.

I did this night promise my wife never to go to bed without calling upon God upon my knees in prayer.

They're a very strange lot actors, very strange people.

I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.

A setback only paves the way for a comeback.

I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion.

As an actor, your motives and your own crazy psyche is really all you're responsible for in the movie.