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.

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

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I'd like to rephrase something I've already written.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

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

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.