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.
They’ll pull the trigger and tell the hammer to hurry.
Writer or a musician, not knowing that it was possible
This is what happens when a boy becomes a man. You get stupider.
For one thing you learns when you is a girl is that most women's hearts is full of secrets.
Sometimes it seemed like the truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.
But at the end of the day, there are some questions that have no answers, and then one answer that has no question: love rules the game. Every time. All the time. That’s what counts.
But as a kid, I preferred the black side, and often wished that Mommy had sent me to black schools like my friends. Instead I was stuck at that white school, P.S. 138, with white classmates who were c...
As a boy, I never knew where my mother was from---where she was born, who her parents were. When I asked she'd say, God made me. When I asked if she was white, she'd say, I'm light-skinned, and change...
It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment.
It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment. And that includes loving somebody. If you can't be your own self, how can you love somebody? How can you be free? Th...
I asked her if I was black or white. She replied You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!
God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you.
Whatever he believed, he believed. It didn’t matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.
Sometimes without conscious realization, our thoughts, our faith, out interests are entered into the past. We talk about other times, other places, other persons, and lose our living hold on the prese...
She wore a flowered blue dress of the type whores naturally favored, and that thing was so tight that when she moved, the daisies got all mixed up with the azaleas. She walked like a warm room full of...
James Brown hid everything, and in the game of instant information he lost big-time, because the information machine turns a truth into a lie and a lie into the truth, transforms superstitions and ste...
If you think looking at three hundred boiling-mad, half-cocked Virginians holding every kind of breechloader under God’s sun staring back at you with murder in their eyes is a ticket to redemption, yo...
I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets.
He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain’t tellin’ nobody who He’s for.
