The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music : an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

I am a novelist, not an activist... But I think that no one who reads what I write or who listens to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom mo…

And so I penned It down, until at last it came to be, For length and breadth, the bigness which you see.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness - when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to k…