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.

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

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…

What has changed is that my life then was less difficult and my future seemingly less gloomy, but as far as my inner self, my way of looking at things and of t…

He was a man who starts at a certain age with all signs showing that he's unable to produce anything of importance. And then, by refusing and refusing things w…

I'm pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-environment and pro-labor. I was either going to be the loneliest Republican in America, or I was going to be a hap…