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

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.

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.

Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.

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

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

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.