All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don't know what's going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that's not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.

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

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.

If you're going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit.

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.

The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.