That's such a great book [Bloods]. That's a perfect way to articulate this thing that we're talking about. Just because someone is a black general, doesn't mean this person is going to have a certain outlook on it.

I talk about folding it in often with Althea, my girlfriend. She's getting her doctoral degree at Berkeley and she talks about how even when writing these very academic, and, for the most part, serious papers there's just so much going on in her head and heart, and it's a reminder that there's a reason that she's studying these things.

It's just never the same. At least for me.It's probably because it's just who I am, I never know what that [truth] is. It's so momentary to go, "Oh, yeah, that's true." That's a fundamental starting point for me - to figure out what's true from moment to moment to moment.

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate."

It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.

The Sellout is about friends and relatives who have touched me in real ways.