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.

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.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

But there are a number of attitudes that should not be emotionally or psychologically ingested by young people.

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

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.