I'd like to do something involving jazz. But books are how I earn my living, and I'd like to stay with the horse I rode in on.

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.

...since I was a little boy, she had always wanted me to go. She was always sending me off on a bus someplace, to elementary school, to camp, to relatives in Kentucky, to college. She pushed me away from her just as she'd pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New York, literally shoving them out the front door when they left for college.

Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.

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."

Testosterone is a sex hormone, and I think it is the most social of hormones. The major social effect of testosterone is to orient us toward issues of sex and power. By the end of puberty testosterone levels in males are 8 to 10 times higher than in females, but decrease with age.

I'd like to do something involving jazz. But books are how I earn my living, and I'd like to stay with the horse I rode in on.