My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.

I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.

Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."

I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.

Don't let the tall weeds cast a shadow on the beautiful flowers in your garden.

Literature is my Utopia

The real you is not you, the real you is what is within you. What is behind your joy or your melancholy. What gives you the reason to ponder. What moves or stops you. What makes you you is you.

The wisdom of nature continues to teach humanity that the material...is immaterial.

Holding onto negativity makes you sick, I strongly believe that. So I release negativity by writing.

You should be able to have good matches against anybody.

The core of humanity's sin problem is not a horizontal behavior to be corrected but a Vertical relationship to be restored.

Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.

Earth endures; Stars abide.

American style is about confidence, independence, diversity and free expression.