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

Without love for my fellow man and respect for nature, to me, life is an obscenity.

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

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.

I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.

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.

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.