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.

The point of Berlin was that it seemed that only people like you ran the city. You never ran into people who weren't like you - especially when you lived as that kind of American in Berlin connected to the arts.

I think that the Vietnam War era is important because we tend not to want to revisit it. For black people, there was the temptation of disaffection. People looked for alternative ways to express themselves personally and politically, people doubted the system, and there was the terrible kind of division in black America between a radical leadership and a much older, compromising leadership.

There's a class divide in black America that doesn't seem to trouble black Americans so much, but whites use it and exploit it. The progress of a few is allowed to stand for the progress of everyone. We can't afford that kind of disaffection at the moment.

Marriage equality is a very middle-class issue and voting rights is a very working-class issue. If you do not vote, who are you speaking for? Who will be the next Fannie Lou Hamer? If not you or someone you know, then who?

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.

I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a mistake.