The mark of fear is not easily removed.

You've got to bend with the wind or you're broken.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.

A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better than anyone else on earth - and that's a myth.

I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.