I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people.

Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.

One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.

By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.

If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.

I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.

You have an utterly sincere glance when you look around after you are shipwrecked. You weep a long time on an island when you realize what's happened to you.