And still when the delicate and unconscious machinery of race relations slips, there will be murder again. How can law contradict the lives of millio… - Richard Wright

A man who worships in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church lives, psychologically, in a burning and continuous moment that never ends: the present is ever-lasting; the past is telescoped into the now; there is no future and at any moment Christ may come again and then the anxious tension of time will be no more.... [My grandmother] lived with all of us, yet, psychologically, she hovered somewhere off in space.... Always she seemed to be peeping out of Heaven into the world while living in the world.

Don't think I'm so odd and strange ... I'm not.... I'm legion ... I've lived alone, but I'm everywhere.

I was preoccupied with books by black people that approached the subject, but I always missed some intimacy, some direction, some voice. Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright-all of whose books I admire enormously-I didn't feel were telling me something. I thought they were saying something about it or us that revealed something about us to you, to others, to white people, to men. Just in terms of the style, I missed something in the fiction that I felt in a real sense in the music and poetry of black artists. When I began writing I was writing as though there was nobody in the world but me and the characters, as though I was talking to them, or us, and it just had a different sound to it.