I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.

...and yet I am what they think I am.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'