To be a survivor as an African American man - maybe any man - you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that's what we all understand.

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.

Reading literature and engaging in writing breaks through the mental rigidity that experience and repetition breeds.

Throw a warrior to the wolves and he’ll return a conqueror.

What I have said to people is that I've lived the American dream, because I have.

Your stupidity is appalling!" "Most stupidity is!

Knowledge humanely applied makes human progress possible.

We seldom break our leg so long as life continues a toilsome upward climb. The danger comes when we begin to take things easily and choose the convenient paths.

From John Huston to Fred Zinnemann and Richard Fleischer and all those great American directors.

Most important part of doing physics is the knowledge of approximation.

That didn't really matter, how you judge how successful you are is basically when you turn up to do a gig and people come and have a good time.

Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.