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" People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don't think it's a blurry line at all. "

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" Poems evolve. I don't feel like I choose them; they just come to me. "

" The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent, too - hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art. "

" Great music - say jazz - has that inventive, improvisational quality that tells us something about life. "

" I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas. "

" I write about what hoaxers do, but I also want us to think about what believers do. Why do we want to believe a story like James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces?' Why did we want to believe that Lance Armstrong really did all these things that, looking back, seemed impossible? "

" Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience. "

" In a long poem or a sequence of poems, you're trying to formalize your obsessions and give them a shape and a name. The key is to realize if the connections you are making are ones with resonance. "

" The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference. "

" A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.' "

" I think the Internet is a free press, you know? "

" I do think there's a certain savviness to be able to recognize the way people want a good story, and I think that we underestimate that. "

" There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism. "

" Writers need their totems, their altars. Mine, I feel, share the same randomness and utility of those belonging to painters I know, who are relentlessly visual and even poetic. "

" I try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they're not so different. "

" There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing. "

" Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as 'black' could not prepare us for the election of America's first undeniably black president, Barack Obama. "

" While claiming advocacy, what hoaxers really exhibit is self-interest. Often, this is because there is only the self to support their false claims; any revelations merely provide further opportunities for details and forgery. "

" Rereading 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was struck by what I had forgotten of the book: in a manner of pages, we encounter shame, history, ruin, conflicting stories, and wounds badly healed; in short, the South. "

" When I was ten and in fifth grade, I read all of 'Robinson Crusoe' in one weekend. "

" For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie - forging an identity, 'making' one, but 'lying' about one, too. "

" I feel music is another kind of literature. "

" I think I go with the Duke Ellington view on music. He said, 'There's two kinds of music - there's good music, and then there's the other kind.' "

" We quickly erase hoaxes once exposed, excising the monstrous palimpsest, because as with any witch hunt or obvious fake, afterward we can't quite explain why we ever believed the outrageous thing in the first place. "

" In the absence of an answer that is complicated and sort of maybe troubling, we sometimes settle for the easy answer. It's easier to believe that my discomfort comes from some fact that is being hidden from me. "

" Not many poets have editors. "

" Listen to the late Isaac Hayes covering 'Walk on By' by Burt Bacharach or Mayfield singing The Carpenters' vanilla-seeming 'We've Only Just Begun,' and you realize soul's insistence on transformation: Mayfield in particular makes the song not just about love but the start of revolution. "

" I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain. "

" For 'The Grey Album,' I'd been thinking about the good side of lying - lying as a kind of improvisatory act in black culture. Afterward, it nagged at me because there are those other kinds of lies that I think are all around us, and I was fascinated about hoaxes in general. So 'Bunk' became a natural extension of 'The Grey Album.' "

" Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous. "

" I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret. "