The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus.

When you walk the significant land, the land speaks to you - even if it's 150 years later. You walk the earth and good things happen. There's always something to be said for going to a spot, even if there's nothing there. That's why you have a brain, your mind moves to other places when you're standing at an important spot.

My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are."

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.

My whole family was - we grew up in New York, but all my relatives and all my father and stepfather's family, they were all from the South. So I like that old Black voice, and I love the sort of old Black man with a corncob pipe, sitting there telling a whopper.

If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.