Until You Expose The Cancer, You Can't

The Black Church Will Accept Anybody.

I Come To The Understanding That Maybe What Was On The Inside Was More Important, And That Your Outer Covering Didn't Count So Much As Folks Thought It Did, Colored Or White, Man Or Woman.

You Know What Needs To Be Done When You're A Writer. You Know What The Job Is, Particularly If You're An African American Writer, Or If You Deal With People, Or If Your Subjects Are Poor People Or People Who Need Voice. So You Don't Really Need To Know Whether Or Not You Are Doing The Right Thing. What You Have To Be Wary Of If You're Doing The Right Thing To The Right Level That Will Surpass Your Own Life. I'm Hoping That My Work Will Surpass My Own Life.

The Thing That I Do Is That When I Fail, I Just Keep Quiet About It. I Just Let It Go. It's Done. I Just Go To The Next Thing. I Don't Complain, I Don't Go To - I Pick My Battles Very, Very Judiciously, And I Just Assume That There's Good In The Heart Of Everybody.

I Felt Like A Tinker Toy Kid Building My Own Self Out Of One Of Those Toy Building Sets; For As She Laid Her Life Before Me, I Reassembled The Tableau Of Her Words Like A Picture Puzzle, And As I Did, So My Own Life Was Rebuilt.