My family is my career.

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

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

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

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.

As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Be kind to the living.

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.

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 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.

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

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