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

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?

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

Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.

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.