America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.
The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.
Learning to sing one’s own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own’s voices, is also the goal of any writer.
My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
It’s fascinating how life works.
I thought, “why don’t we be innovative and create something nobody had ever done before?” It was a huge hit and we immediately did a sequel with Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner and Maya Angelou.
The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.
Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within ‘black community’ by and large.
One principle I’ve been fighting for that doesn’t endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
One must learn how to be black in America.
Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
The genius is making a way out of no way.
Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.
My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn’t live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.
It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.
It’s no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race.
In the old days, you lived in one neighborhood, you knew all your neighbors and your daughter married the guy next door. That was social and economic progress. That model is gone now. We also had a world order that was fraught but fairly stable.
You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.