I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.

Everything's been said, but it needs saying again.

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.

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

I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I'm trying to figure out what manliness really is.

Now, about that mulatto teacher and me. There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything. He hated me, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I didn't like him, but I needed him, needed him to tell me something that none of the others could or would.

Anytime a child is born, the old people look in his face and ask him if he's the One.