Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

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.

Hell, I'm going to play pro basketball. I'm going to maybe be famous. I'm going to write books.

I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.

As a reader, I do not like to have everything handed to me. Because after a while it gets formulaic and I'm thinking, "If this is so thought through, then why do I need to read it. It's done!" It becomes a beach book at a certain point.

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

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.