The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we’d probably go to war.
I also wanted to do something that I hadn’t really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.
Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you’re from, what your class is – those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.
You’d never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.
When you’re artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.
Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.
Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.
The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what’s going on with the self, that’s the general thing people are talking about.
Volumptuous women look good. Ignorant messages from mass media tell women what size to be, but female qualities-a softness, a soothing capacity that a woman has no matter what size she happens to be-sustain the more humane aspects of civilization.
People don’t really think other people are the same.
Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I’d like to rephrase something I’ve already written.
Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience – or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.
You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.
When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.
Unfortunately, I’m not a person that’s always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy.