From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

How we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.

It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.

Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.