I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ru…

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent - which attitude cer…

When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible,…

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

A dark unfathom'd tide Of interminable pride - A mystery, and a dream, Should my early life seem.

I was seven years old. What do you know when you're seven years old? All my life, or so I thought, we'd been in the city of Alexandria, in the Street of the Ca…