It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.

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

Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.

You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.

There haven't been fundamental structural changes in America. There's been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.