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

A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.

Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.

I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.

One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.