If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.
Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.
Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.
You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.
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.
When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.
Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.
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.
The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.
What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.
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.
Our democratic richness arrives when we're able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately.
Unfortunately, I'm not a person that's always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy.
Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don't know what's going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that's not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.
Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.
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.
Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.
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.
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.
People don't really think other people are the same.
