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.

People don't really think other people are the same.

In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

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

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

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