You've got to bend with the wind or you're broken.

The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.

I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline.

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

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.

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.

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