Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves.

Just because I don't harass it like some peoples us know don't mean I ain't got religion.

My writing is very organic. It's what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that's very essential to my being.

It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand and lie about who you actually are.

A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.

Our problem mostly in our abuse of each other and the planet is greed. Just the rampant, incredible greed that people have partly because they're empty and they can't get enough because they're - you know, it's that Buddhist thing about the hungry ghost with the little mouth and the big belly.

I think America has always been polarized... It's a racist country and it has always been.