Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.

...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.

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.

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.

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

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.

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