Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself

Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.

Love is never any better than the lover.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays

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

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