In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history.

I read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, "Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be true." He's not saying, "I'm trying to lie to you." But he's kind of saying that you can never say what something really is.

It's weird because there is progress somehow. But there's so much that just feels the same. How important is that rank? How important is it that I am allowed to make these decisions? What does that really mean? What is progress? Is it progress that a black guy gets to push a button for the nuclear bomb? Is that progress? Maybe, I don't know.

I remember going to see Amiri Baraka. It wasn't actually too long before he died. He said, "You've got to write to change the world!" I was like, "Not me, no, no, no, no."

I think, and a lot of that has to do with where I grew up in California; [status] isn't something I think about that much.

I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .

I think there's nothing new going on. Except that, you're even more public than you've ever been.There's some good and some bad to that.