Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up.

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 you think about the future . . . give thanks and trust God . . . Even when life may be difficult, we should thank God for all He does for us—which we do not deserve.

I just had to find the courage to take that first step.

Love never stands still; it must inevitably be either growing or decaying - especially the love of marriage.

If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell it.

I saw 'True Blood' once, and I like the jazzy feel of it and stuff.

We can't always control what happens but we can control our response

God is Love. We eventually have to ask ourselves the question; why was Love nailed to a cross?

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

The head governs, the heart assists, the body acts.

Self-righteousness is the devil's masterpiece to make us think well of ourselves.