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" That sense of mystery, but also of revelation, is what I turn to poems for. They're able to embody experience. We need more and more of that. "

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" 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.' "

" Forget reparations - we need to rescue aspects of black culture abandoned even by black folks, whether it is the blues or home cookin' or broader forms of not just survival but triumph. "

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

" Certainly, there is, in our culture, this notion of, you know, you can become anything. You can change. "

" Can you explore real issues as a fake character? Yes - it's called acting. Or fiction. But acting is not a method of engaging with the actual world, just as pretending to know what a character might eat does not a novel make - much less make that make-believe real. "

" For me Louisiana was mostly family when I was there. We hardly left; there was no need to... We hardly left the front porch. You would just sit, and folks would come by, and it was really old school in that way. "

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

" 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 think music is poetry in the sense that I think the condition of poetry I'm going for has some qualities of music that it aspires to. "

" 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. "

" Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain. "

" We've learned quickly that the Web is far more pseudonymous than anonymous: online, our names have simply been changed to a number, an I.P. address, protocol, and code. "

" 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 remember in the '80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist. "

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

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

" When I'm in full-on writing mode and have the day, I try to get in my office around 10 A.M. and stop once 'Judge Judy' comes on at 4, when I quit and come down. Sometimes, I leave her on while I edit - if she can make the tough calls, then so can I. "

" Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.' "

" It took a while for anyone to want to publish 'To Repel Ghosts.' I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn't. "

" What a poem can do is provide you this intimate eye that, for the length of a poem and hopefully a little bit after, can provide testimony or a point of view. "

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

" The first rule of influence is that there isn't any. The second rule of influence is that it is everywhere. "

" It's hard to describe one's own alchemy that makes one into a writer, but I definitely think American language is so interesting, and specifically Southern language and black Southern language; it's hard to separate Southern language from black language. "

" 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.' "

" To me, poetry is spoken - not exclusively, but there's a mix of languages in it. That's what I liked about 'For the Confederate Dead;' it has many different tones to it. "

" 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. "

" I feel music is another kind of literature. "

" Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it. "

" Not many poets have editors. "

" I think that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived. "