It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

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

The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.

Love is never any better than the lover.

Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.

I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?