As a child I wanted to be a professional athlete or lawyer.
As a young man, I saw families prosper without reading because there were always sufficient opportunities for willing workers who could follow simple instructions. This is no longer the case. Children who don't read are, in the main, destined for lesser lives. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to change this.
After so many books and so many years of writing, I have a good idea of my strengths and weaknesses. I love the process of writing and, if I allowed myself, I would write far too much every day. One weakness which I've struggled to overcome is my tendency to having my characters ruminate for pages.
I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.
I write in a small office at home.
I like people who take responsibility for their lives.
I would enjoy having dinner with the poet/playwright Derek Walcott.
I talk to myself out loud at times, and feel embarrassed when people overhear me.
I was teased if I brought my books home. I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me - because I would hit them in a heartbeat. But I felt a little ashamed, having books.
There is a crisis involving reading in certain communities.
We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.
I couldn't speak well. I went to speech therapy for 10 years. And I was sort of frustrated in that sense.
I didn't even know for years that people ever even got paid for this, because they don't teach you that in school. They don't say Shakespeare got a check.
I began going to juvenile prisons. And some of these kids face some very, very tough lives. How do they handle these lives? Do they even know that if their life is bad, that they're still OK? Do they know that? Do they know that someone is thinking the same way that they're thinking?
I came to Harlem from West Virginia when I was three, after my mother died. My father, who was very poor, gave me up to two wonderful people, my foster parents.
My younger brother's death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In 'Fallen Angels' I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic.
I want young people to be hesitant to glorify war and to demand of their leaders justification for the sacrifices they ask of our citizens.
If what I read doesn't reflect my life - whether I'm gay or Latino or on welfare - doesn't that really mean that my life is not valuable?
When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life... I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.
I'll never live to write all the stories I have in my head.
