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

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.

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…

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

Music has been taken over by commercialism or capitalism or whatever it is.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Same thing happened in the Punk Movement in the late 70's. It's like, major labels were signing punk bands right after the band's first gig, y'know, a punk ban…