I think that is what we do by preserving and telling our stories. If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change. So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.

My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults.

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

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

Everybody wants to have sex - you don't have to have a baby when you're 16. You don't have to do drugs. I think our Sunday schools should be turned into Black history schools and computer schools on the weekend, just like Hebrew schools for Jewish people, or my Asian friends who send their kids to schools on the weekend to learn Chinese or Korean.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.