Better to listen to the gospel than to a mortal leader.

Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book.

Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.

All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.

The police and I have a deal. I don't talk to them and they don't listen to me.

One wouldn't want to say that what makes a good writer is the number of books that the writer wrote because you could write a whole number of bad books. Books that don't work, mediocre books, or there's a whole bunch of people in the pulp tradition who have done that. They just wrote... and actually they didn't write a whole bunch of books, they just wrote one book many times.

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall'.