Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.

It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.

I didn't feel particularly close to my father.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

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

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.

In 1957, when I was in second grade, black children integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. We watched it on TV. All of us watched it. I don't mean Mama and Daddy and Rocky. I mean all the colored people in America watched it, together, with one set of eyes.