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.

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.

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

Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.

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.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value.