When you shoot someone who is fleeing, it's not self-defense. It's an execution.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

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.

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.

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.

In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.