It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

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.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

This word "LOVE" - discredited, "clicheed" - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you - plus our language, the language, a language - is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human.