To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

This trivializing rhetoric runs the subtle but unmistakable message: pray if you like, worship if you must, but whatever you do, do not on any account take your religion seriously.

We live today in a world in which nobody believes choices should have consequences. But may I tell you the great secret that our culture seeks to deny? You cannot escape the consequences of your choices. Time runs in only one direction.

We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed.

There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.

Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available.

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.