A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.

That split is inside all Americans. There are contradictions inside all of us about color and race. We've learned to cover them up and live with them and pretend that deep cleavage is not there. We all bear that illness.

I really dislike it when people talk about "experimental," because any good writer is experimental.

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.

My grandfather had asked me many times whether I'd like to come to South Carolina with him. He wanted to introduce me to our people down there and I didn't want to go. In those days, the South was still a place where black kids were lynched. Something horrible could happen to you. I've had that feeling my whole life.

That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.