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.
If you're going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit.
If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.
You must be willing to accept the fact that pain is a part of the process of revelation.
All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.
When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.
The extent of his influence across jazz, across American music, and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.
Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.
Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.
When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.
Our democratic richness arrives when we're able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately.
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.
People don't really think other people are the same.
You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.
But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.
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.
I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.
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.
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.
I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.
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.
What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.
The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value.
But there are a number of attitudes that should not be emotionally or psychologically ingested by young people.
As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.
