Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

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.

Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

Music and writing do fold together in the sense that you have to have a certain level of skill in order to execute your ideas and you need a medium. The idea of improvisation is one that many writers fall into, and I improvise a great deal when I'm writing, but there's a structural framework that I'm working around, and that takes more time than the actual writing. Once the characters get to yapping and talking, they'll move from one room to the next, and I just have to make sure that the house is built. That's really hard, that's the kind of thing that sits with you all day long.

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.

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

I'm one of the few Black writers, or African American writers, who managed to work my way through the system so that it has allowed me to speak in a kind of free way. But most African American writers don't have that. They don't have that opportunity, they don't have that.