I write with as much objectivity as I can.

I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.

I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn't be the writing.

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.

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.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

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.