Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.

James Brown was the Monday-to-Friday guy. He was the hardest man in show business. He was like your dad and your uncle: He showed up, and he hit hard.

If you meet your heroes, you're always going to be disappointed. Frederick Douglass was a great man, but would I want my daughter to marry him? Probably not. That doesn't mean that I don't think he's a great man.

The abolitionists were not like the rugged people out West, and they were not like John Brown, either. They were people who made speeches and did politics.

When you glorify violence, then it comes back to bite you.

My wife and kids like the quiet and the countryside - I still find that kind of quiet hard to listen to.

I just love music, and I love what music does for people.

Caring is beyond race. Either people care about you, or they don't.

Anyone can write your own life story.

I don't want to read a book that's depressing.

A band is not a democracy: It's show business.

I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.

You can play Mozart all you want and pretend that it gives you class, but what is class, you know? Class is a bus driver on the M103 who gets off the bus to help somebody on board even though he's tired, he's exhausted, and he's two months behind on his mortgage. That's real class.

My father died in 1957, just before I was born. My mother went to her Jewish aunt, who slammed the door in her face.

You have to be able to toss the thing out. You can't fall in love with your characters, and you have to know when to fight - and when to quit.

Be kind to the living.

It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.

When you study history in American schools, very rarely is the name John Brown mentioned. We know who Kanye West is or Twyla Tharp or Shania Twain.

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

I'm not interested in food. It's just fuel.

Be a member of the human race. Love somebody. Change the world.

A lot of people are not interested in stories in which they don't see themselves.

I love the language of, you know, the old black country man with a blues guitar and... boots and the quick banter.

I'd like to do something involving jazz. But books are how I earn my living, and I'd like to stay with the horse I rode in on.

I cannot recall any moment of clarity about becoming a writer. I always liked to read. That's what did it.

We would not have been a successful family without my father and stepfather, who were working-class men with better dreams for their children. We just wore them out.

You make your own luck by working hard, you know?

John Brown was clearly flawed in real life. He did some terrible things, but he did some things none of us would have had the heart to do. His moral leanings were unquestionably admirable.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

When you're interviewing someone, even your mother - you have to sort of deal with you have to get some objective space from yourself and the person but you also have to find what's the best way to get the information from that person.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

My family is my career.

I'm proud of 'Miracle at St. Anna' and I loved it; there's no question in my mind it's as good as any movie that came out in 2007.

I wish all critics, no matter their color, were more sophisticated when it comes to the moral questions a film like 'St. Anna' is trying to raise.

The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.

The black church will accept anybody.

As a writer, you have to be near people and hear stuff. I'm a hamburger and cheese kind of fellow; I'm not Henry David Thoreau.

Don't get me started on Americans and war. One of the things I learnt over in Italy is how they mythologised the war so that it's all good old gung-ho guys from Omaha and ignored everyone else's role.

I just don't see the point in sitting around hollering the blues over things you have no control over. It's all in God's hands.

If you don't have humor, you're not going to make it. You're going to be one of those people who walks around with your head about to explode.

I don't come from Lake Wobegon, and that world is not mine. It's not that funny to me. It's funny to other people, and I'm not judging it, but the world that I come from is not considered funny by other people as well. There's so much pain in it.

People process pain differently. My family, we were pretty humorous about things that went on.

I read more history books than anything else.

I'm not one of those who can listen to music and write. I need the door closed. Windows shut. Facing the wall. No birds tweeting, views of nature, and so forth.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

When you tell them you're a writer, they say, 'What have you written?' And then you've got to tell them what you've done. I don't ask a plumber what he does. Then I have to explain what I've done, and I haven't really, you know. I've just told some stories.

I can't be a creative person if I'm a celebrity.

The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what's been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring.