The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.

Two of the great leaders of the past - Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass - had White fathers - who deserted them. Now Margo Jefferson, who is hard on me and the fellas, wrote in the Times that she has nocturnal, erotic fantasies about John Wayne. What's up with these feminists? Do you see these double standards these feminists have? They dream about John Wayne, but they're hard on us [Black men].

I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."

Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.

I use non-fiction work written by Whites in my research. It's indispensable. That wasn't the problem. I said that "The Wire" was a cliché! It's like my writing a series about Jewish life and casting all of the characters as inside traders.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.