You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

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

Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.

When you think of sexual liberation, which women wanted to have or not have children, which is the choice, not a command, and other kinds of things they wanted in their relationships with their husbands, or partners or what have you, became for subsequent generations some license that they themselves feel, that is absolutely demeaning and mean younger and younger and younger.

...when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.