I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black.

All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.

There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound is sad, as rough as rough can be and be called smooth. When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And since I've been playing music, I've been called all different kinds of fool - more times than Lobey, which is my name.

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.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.

Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present…We sit around and look at what we see around us and we say how can the world be different