Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

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.

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

Volumptuous women look good. Ignorant messages from mass media tell women what size to be, but female qualities-a softness, a soothing capacity that a woman has no matter what size she happens to be-sustain the more humane aspects of civilization.

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

Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don't know what's going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that's not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.

When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.