If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.

When I'm not creating or focusing on something I can imagine or invent, I think I go back over my life - I don't recommend this by the way - and you pick up, oh, what'd you do that for? Why didn't you understand this?

The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.