Occupation: Novelist Birth: 1953
If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away..
I think that the Vietnam War era is important because we tend not to want to revisit it. For black people, there was the temptation of disaffection. ….
I can see Obama trying to be the president who suggests solutions for everyone who has experienced economic hardship..
You can get away with anything as long as it works..
Home is the place where there is somebody who does not wish you any pain..
Obama can't be everything to everyone. He changed. He did. I never thought I'd hear Obama say, "Let's go back to nuclear arms," but he did. In the me….
When you are writing the kind of criticism you hope you're writing, everything depends on keeping your calm or your cool. You're trying to tell someo….
It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine..
Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about..
In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with onc….
When you're writing fiction it's a heightened voice. You're trying to cast a spell, which isn't the same thing as trying to cast someone into it. You….
It's important for the progressive youth to remember that the agenda you set today is the agenda that will matter tomorrow. If you are engaged and ac….
The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's pur….
Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that; it's just ….
There's a class divide in black America that doesn't seem to trouble black Americans so much, but whites use it and exploit it. The progress of a few….
I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a m….
Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it's not such a big deal..
The point of Berlin was that it seemed that only people like you ran the city. You never ran into people who weren't like you - especially when you l….
Economic justice is not just something blacks are crying out for; whites are desperate for it, too. But in the public imagination, the face of povert….
What happened after World War I was disgraceful. Most veterans, like my great-uncle, were squashed back into place. Congress couldn't pass an anti-ly….
As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better ….