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

I think Black intellectuals see too deeply. That's the problem. It's a cause of anxiety, because we see things differently.

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

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.

I walked out on American Gangster: this evil piece of dreck. Defenders of this junk say that these movies give Black actors jobs. So did "Birth of a Nation."

American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.

I try to do what has never been done before.