All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

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

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

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.

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.

We wait till now? Now, when we're old men, we get to be brave?

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.