I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it.

People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.

I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .

Why are the mainstream buzz things rarely contemporary? It doesn't happen very often. It's hard to feel culpable or implicated or even apathetic.

I think there's nothing new going on. Except that, you're even more public than you've ever been.There's some good and some bad to that.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words.

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history.

Human life is under the absolute dominion of two mighty principles, fear and hope, and that any one who can make these serve his ends may be sure of rapid fortune.

leaders don't watch but make things happen-initiate change

New Jersey Mayor Corey Booker last night personally rescued a woman from a burning building. Or as Fox News reported it, 'black man loots house, steals white woman.'

Eventually I foresee voting on the Internet, which will lead to much more direct democracy.

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

The transformation from body identification to spirit identification is the purpose of our lives.

No matter how far apart we are, we are all under and looking at the same sky.

I had a couple of million dollars' worth of... stock once. And now it's not worth much more than wallpaper. I guess I just wasn't born to be rich.

For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human.

You don't have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.