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.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, I'm not a person that's always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy.

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

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

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.