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.

You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

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.

You must be willing to accept the fact that pain is a part of the process of revelation.

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

Volumptuous women look good. Ignorant messages from mass media tell women what size to be, but female qualities-a softness, a soothing capacity that a woman has no matter what size she happens to be-sustain the more humane aspects of civilization.