You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.

Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor; those who struggle are middle class.

Some say we are responsible for those we love. Others know we are responsible for those who love us.

It is not who you attend school with but who controls the school you attend.

Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy

I am proud of the hip hop generation. They are good business people and, actually, good people. It's strange that the only time the major press talks about them is when someone gets killed or does drugs or something; yet these are the same press people who made heroes out of the Mafia and other crooks, you know.

It's not a ladder we're climbing, it's literature we're producing. . . . We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people.