Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.

The children - I call them children when they're under 18 - are hungry for that love. The drugs are just a sleep that you can't even wake up from, because you might remember what you did when you were there. There's no place for them - there should be a rehabilitation center on every corner, along with McDonald's and the banks. This is serious business. The waiting lists are incredible. I mean, it's terrible. It's really terrible.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

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