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

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.

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

One sees a trend in our political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant, a trend supported by a rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with religious devotion.

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

In contemporary American culture, the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs - almost as fads - rather than as the fundaments upon which the devout build their lives.

We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action.