The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

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.

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.

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

Be optimistic and enthusiastic about your dreams.

He smiled. "You didn't think we were going to follow orders from a psychopath and run scared, did you?

Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.

I don't think I was funny until college. I lived with some Harvard MD/PhD students - they were so smart, and what I contributed to the house was, I was the funny one.

Tout notre raisonnement se re duit a' ce der au sentiment. All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling.

Drug dealers live vicariously through me

Rigorous teaching schedules combined with mounds of paperwork can lead to burnout.

Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.

Acceptance doesn't mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there's got to be a way through it.

As you walk through forests or the meadows of your mind, Stop and talk to those you fear Good friendships you may find