Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious.

Things seem to fall apart inevitably.

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.

I'm still divided in my principles and what I think is right and what I'm actually able to do, whether talking about writing or being a citizen or being a husband or being a father. And I'm trying to get better.

To be a survivor as an African American man - maybe any man - you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that's what we all understand.

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.

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.