One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

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.

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.

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

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

Two things define you, your attitude when you are at your worst and your attitude when you are at your best.

A lady of forty-seven who has been married twenty-seven years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody.'

I touch the future. I teach.

I'm not 100% nice all the time, so I find it quite hard to be really pleasant.

My works are all expressly my own - pleasingly peculiar, not a borrowed stroke in one of them. I write as I feel and as I don't feel.

A mayor is a symbol and a public face of what a city bureaucracy provides its citizens.

Strong families are not an accident...They take thought and intention and preparation and skill.

I wake the dead. I bring Jackie Robinson and the Roosevelts to life. Who do you think Im trying to wake up?

Why does everyone keep asking me that?" Seriously, did I look like some sort of pyscho assassin? Maybe it was the pink sneakers. Or the heart earrings?