I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

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

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

It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.