Remember that a book is many drafts - mine certainly are. It's improvisation. It's as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing.

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

I had a deep prejudice against the South. It's taken me many years to get over that, be more open and thoughtful.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.

You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.

All Stories are True.

I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

Time is life. It is irreversible and irreplaceable. To waste your time is to waste your life, but to master your time is to master your life and make the most of it.

I think that between 27 and 37 was a really big learning decade.

I think anything that you can't poke fun at is a little too precious.

When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him.

The courage to care about your people, your clients, and your career.

The most important person is the audience and the composer. The rest of us - and even the composer is a servant to the audience. And of course, the audience is a servant to the higher art.

Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations.

We do not attract Russian money to Luxembourg with high interest rates.

I always saw myself as a singer-songwriter, a solo-artist, that's why working with other artists was never satisfying for me.

There is no actual stress or anxiety in the world, your thoughts create these false beliefs.