For obvious reasons, the relationship between novelists, the reviewing establishment and critics in general is chronically, and often acutely, edgy. A kind of low-intensity warfare prevails, with outbreaks of savagery. It is partly an ownership issue...
I look upon ourselves as partners in all of this, and that each of us contributes and does what he can do best. And so I see not a top rung and a bottom rung - I see all this horizontally - and I see this as part of a matrix. And I see every human be...
A few lessons learned as a teacher: I've learned that if you whisper, children will listen...a scribble can be anything (I mean anything!) a monster, a cat, a mom, a dad--our job is to ask to find out and pay attention--usually the most challenging s...
Jesus kinda fools around and gives you parables. He doesn't oftentimes say exactly what he means. But in Matthew 25, he's very, very clear. And he delineates what it takes to get into the Kingdom of Heaven very, very clearly. And he says how you trea...
Living in the box means being convinced that other people and our circumstances are responsible for our feelings and our helplessness to overcome them. What we can't see when we're in the box is that the way the world appears to us is our projection,...
This book (Jarod Kintz's book) is trash. I mean, I assume it is, because that's where I found it while scrounging for lunch. However, I must admit that I haven't read it. I would have, but I am homeless, mainly due to my illiteracy (though Big Govern...
I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-c...
I may not be a trained actor, but I've paid my dues. And I mean that literally. I am a fully dues-paid member of SAG/AFTRA. As a political figure, I've been called a 'card carrying' member of numerous groups that I'm not a member of - and now I'm bei...
Hate. The word is thrown around as uselessly and as often as love is, and is used as a means in which to accuse and inflict damage; the weak-in-argument (weak in general) use it to discredit those with whom they disagree rather than dissect the issue...
If I have my opinion about something, you have your opinion about something, we don't have to fight over it. And we can have a conversation. We can also disagree without being disagreeable, and we can just disagree, which is fine. It doesn't mean tha...
I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we woul...
What you were supposed to hear when the record played backwards was the phrase . Nobody had a very firm idea of what that was supposed to mean, but they all agreed about what they were hearing: that it was a hellish picture to paint, and for young pe...
I mean, when I got to Brown, the place was riven, because you had older professors who were basically new critics and had been teaching a certain way for 30 years. And then you had this other gang who was down with the semiotic program. And as a stud...
Using time, pressure and patience, the universe gradually changes caterpillars into butterflies, sand into pearls, and coal into diamonds. You’re being worked on too, so hang in there. Just because something isn’t apparent right now, doesn’t me...
No, I don’t think you’re gonna be single forever, and also I don’t understand your obsession with romantic love. There are other ways to have fulfilling relationships that can sustain you and make your life great and fun other than having a sex...
My best advice is to first write for yourself and stay in your story and just pour all of your good stuff and bad stuff into it. By 'stuff,' I mean all the experiences and pleasures and little hurts that make up a life. Because even (and especially) ...
In the mainstream, with its illusion of unlimited relational possibilities, we can counter dissatisfaction in relationships by simply moving on in search of the "right people." But community...demands we cultivate friendships with people we might not...
I learned that dying is just a part of our journey of life. We are all on this journey and dying is a part of it for each of us. That does not mean that hope is hone. Hope just changes to a very realistic, practical hope... Sometimes hope becomes mor...
In life there is reality and there is what you want in life. If you took a moment to step back and forget about everything that is going on that doesn't really mean that much anyway, you might be able to figure out how to get what you want and what h...
Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just...
It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, bec...
