If I feel like I haven't really tapped into the essence of the story when I do an assignment, I may revisit it on my own, and that's when I feel freer to add my imagination. But I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy.
One of the things I liked about writing for a magazine was a kind of anonymity. When you do books, it's different than magazine pieces because you become a 'figure.'
Eminem was someone that I discovered I liked, largely because of his relationship to language and to his mother.
I think one of the things that started to hinder Baldwin as an artist later on was that he became really aware of power, so he wanted it, too. But if you look at the work before that, before 'The Fire Next Time' put him on the cover of 'Time Magazine,' it was much more intimate and a much more internal conversation.
If you want to take writing on, you should pay writing the respect it deserves, which is to say, reading it.
My self encompasses a lot of different things.
I didn't like '12 Years a Slave' because it was playing to the Spielbergian model of redemption.
I'm not one of those people who's against all-black productions of Tennessee Williams plays, but there are lot more complex and natural ways to bring people of color into the theater.
I love Andre Leon Talley as a person.
I'm one of those crazy people who have to write every day. Otherwise, I feel really sort of despondent, and it's because I don't feel very happy about not learning.
I don't know what else teaches you as much as writing. Perhaps reading. So if I don't have one or the other in the course of the day, I feel old.
I think that you don't really want to write a book that doesn't really move people and doesn't get them to think.
I think, what's the point of writing a book that you would get in one sitting?
Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals.
American musicals are, for the most part, about boys, or boyish pursuits and aspirations - the fantasy of freedom and resolve - and those dreams have little to do with the reality of most black women's lives.
I used to think that the feeling of alienation that I would have was just me, but I realise that it's also a symptom of the modern world.
For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like.
If you have a word of encouragement, you can do anything.
Boredom means you develop your own interior life.
