“You don’t have to try at all to be a racist. It’s a little coiled clot of venom lurking there in all of us, white and black, goy and Jew, ready to strike out when we feel embattled, belittled, brutalized.”

"Maybe if we all get drunk enough we'll all have blackouts so trackless and remarkably sustained that we'll never remember all the reprehensible things we said and did to each other, hence no guilt"

"I feel battered by culture shock — ­an experience that has mainly served to teach me how little I know, and how much I have falsely assumed"

“What made 147th Street so bad was the kids. They had all grown up right in the neighborhood; now they were killing it, and each other.”

"Jeddy Gates was that increasingly rare phenomenon in American life — a legend who has not become a celebrity"

“They were in Harlem because they were the tough­est guys the department could find, and it ap­peared that if anyone could take care of themselves, and me as well, it would be the people in Sixth Homicide.”

“When I actually made myself look at Harlem, what I saw was so bizarre that, even with the help of those homicide detectives, I found it bewildering — another country, another planet.”

“If anyone had told me in 1969 that George Clinton and Al Green would be two of my three favorite rock and rollers of the ’70s my only response would have been ‘Who?’ Which is why I’m not going to try and foretell the future now.”

“Maybe the best that can be said of jazz in the ’70s is that it didn’t just survive. It established its own precedents and raised important questions about an art that was finally pushed beyond its golden age.”