I don't know why people always compare me [ with Amiri Baraka] I was never part of the Black Arts Repertory Theater or the Black Arts Movement; people who claim that I was are wrong. I was downtown. I was living in Chelsea when they were operating in Harlem.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

I'm beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of deathamong Americans. What you don't know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright's character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.

My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.

Americans are fickle. And what constitutes the enemy is always changing. Believe it or not, at one time Blacks were the favored model minority over Asian Americans.

Few white citizens are acquainted with blacks other than those projected by the media and the so--called educational system, whichis nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments based upon one's ability to pledge loyalty oaths to Anglo culture. The media and the "educational system" are the prime sources of racism in the United States.

I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.