I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."

In Haitian mythology there is the figure Ghede, who in West Africa, is Iku, whose role is to show "each man his devil." He's represented by a figure wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. That's my gig.

Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up.

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.

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

[David] Mamet is another hypocrite. His idea of Black man is a pimp who abuses women, [Edmond], yet his play Oleanna [1994] ends with a White professor slapping an uppity feminist, at least the version I saw at San Francisco's ACT.

When I say Afro-American aesthetic, I'm not just talking about the United States, I'm talking about the Americas. People in the Latin countries read my books because they share the same international aesthetic that I'm into and have been into for a long time. And it's multicultural.