My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

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.

He would have given anything for a tension-breaker-maybe, if he prayed hard enough, the school would catch on fire or something.

I have yet to go through a struggle I didn't smile at later.

Two poor together are richer than one poor because they can somehow help each other!

The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.

Consciousness conceives, governs, constructs, and becomes the activity of the body.

Only when one is able to grasp wideness can one possess it.

Conceit is a privilege of the ignorant; the wise man is humble because he knows how little he knows.

He (Honus Wagner) was the nearest thing to a perfect player no matter where his manager chose to play him.

The pictures which do not represent an intense interest cannot expect to create an intense interest.

Anti-depressan ts Controlling tools of your system Making life more tolerable Making life more tolerable