Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.

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.

Christian holy duty is to know the Lord Jesus Christ.

Prayer is a great opportunity to receive grace from God.

Your truth isn't everybody else's truth.

When you're not practicing, someone somewhere is. And when the two of you meet, assuming roughly equal ability, the other person will win.

Even though the story [Fences] is set during the 1950s, some contemporary women might have trouble understanding her decision.

I had never liked bullying of any sort, especially when an individual acquires his courage by becoming part of a faceless mob. I always say if you need fake courage, get it out of a bottle like I do.

Until my ONE thing is done, everything else is a distraction.

If Beethoven is a prodigy of man, Bach is a miracle of God.

It is observed of gold, by an old epigrammatist, that to have it is to be in fear, and to want it is to be in sorrow.

After I found April Barrows, I felt I had found a soul mate. Her stuff is exactly what I was looking for.