When you're at the basketball court watching a game, one person may be talking about a fight he had with his wife, another is talking about the last hard-on he got, someone else is talking about the presidential election. The language and the tone and the voice - I'd love to be able to capture that spontaneity.

You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.

The hardship, the pain, the suffering of my brother and my son in prison, that's absolutely their experience, that's not mine. I don't get any credit for enduring that. I never give myself any credit for enduring that.

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

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

There is no American history. There is no French history. There is no John Wideman. There are all these dreams that are floating around. People construct them and fight with them and criticize them, and the world goes on. I don't think the stars pay much attention.

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.