“Giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.”

Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.

You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.

You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.

Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.

What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.

It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.

[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.

Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.

It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.

[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.

And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.

Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.

Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.

If somebody dumps something noxious in my back yard, the dumper is the last one I would call on to repair the damage.

If we could magically transport ourselves back to the young Earth, when it was only a billion years old or two billion years old or three billion years old or four billion years old.

We receive grace from the sacrament. And when we fumble due to sin – and it’s gonna happen – confession puts us back on the field.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

In the back of my mind, I can never forget this could be gone tomorrow – and at this point I think the odds are against me…

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’

Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.