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.

Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That's the only thing.

I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.

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.

What I miss today more than anything else - I don't go to church as much anymore - but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.

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

Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.