Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.

At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.

People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.

The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.