As a writer, you explore all kinds of different emotions.

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.

Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.

I have T.V. on all the time when I'm writing. I have music on. I'm engaged with the world.

Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.

The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.