There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.

And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.

Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.

One of the monstrous things that slavery in this country caused was the breakup of families. I mean, physical labor, horrible; beatings, horrible; lynching death, all of that, horrible. But the living life of a parent who, A, has no control over what happens to your children, none. They don't belong to you. You may not even nurse them. They may be shipped off somewhere, as in "Beloved" the mother was, to be nursed by somebody who was not able to work in the fields and was a wet nurse.

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.