The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are.

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race.

Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.

I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.

My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.