I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.

We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.

I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

I know that my books are worthy, which is separate from me.

Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.