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 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.

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

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

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.

The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.