My Novels And Poems Are Meant To

I Don't Know Why People Always Compare Me [ With Amiri Baraka] I Was Never Part Of The Black Arts Repertory Theater Or The Black Arts Movement; People Who Claim That I Was Are Wrong. I Was Downtown. I Was Living In Chelsea When They Were Operating In Harlem.

I Think Black Intellectuals See Too Deeply. That's The Problem. It's A Cause Of Anxiety, Because We See Things Differently.

In The Middle Of The Next Century, When The Literary Establishment Will Reflect The Multicultural Makeup Of This Country And Not Be Dominated By Assimiliationists With Similar Tastes, From Similar Backgrounds, And Of Similar Pretensions, Langston Hughes Will Be To The Twentieth Century What Walt Whitman Was To The Nineteenth.

I Have T.v. On All The Time When I'm Writing. I Have Music On. I'm Engaged With The World.

My Work Holds Up The Mirror To Hypocrisy, Which Puts Me In A Tradition Of American Writing That Reaches Back To Nathaniel Hawthorne.