I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.

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.

Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.

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

"You going back," she said. "You ain't going to run away from this, Grant."

Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.

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.