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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.