America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

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

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 knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

The biggest surprise for me, without a doubt, was that the first black people who came to the United States weren't the 20 who arrived in Jamestown in 1619. All of us had been taught that. The first African came to Florida in 1513. And the huge shock is we know his name, Juan Garrido, and that he wasn't a slave. He was free!

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.