People don't really think other people are the same.

Our democratic richness arrives when we're able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately.

I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.

The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value.

I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.