Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that; it's just where we are in the history of our perceptions.

Freedom is having real choice. This offers a limited amount of choices. This is participating in a very imperfect system that we're desperately hanging onto, that we don't want to see further eroded.

If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away.

When you're writing fiction it's a heightened voice. You're trying to cast a spell, which isn't the same thing as trying to cast someone into it. You are creating a reality but it's a different sort of performance.

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.

Obama can't be everything to everyone. He changed. He did. I never thought I'd hear Obama say, "Let's go back to nuclear arms," but he did. In the meantime, the clear and present danger is the Republicans in the Senate. A lot of politics isn't heroic, it's as day-to-day as our lives themselves. We always want to make the Byronic choices, but Byron himself was not Byronic all the time either.

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.