Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.

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.

Be on the right way and go in the right direction. Once you are never going back, you will progress day after day, little by little.

Breaking the cycle of ungrace means taking the initiative.

Screw it. Girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

Live a life of friction. Let yourself be disturbed as much as possible, but observe.

There are so many things that have to go right for a movie to be good that it's a miracle whenever one is.

In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.

The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at crossroads.

I'm still amazed by the process of recording.

It is almost certain that we will fail. But how will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal?

I'm like a child who belongs to nobody.