Harlem exists in retrospect, in the memory of grandparents or elderly cousins, those 'old-timers' ever ready with their geysers of remembered scenes. The legends of 'Black Mecca' are preserved in the glossy musicals of Times Square and in texts of virtually every kind.

Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto' is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.

Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.

I'd waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I'd visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis.

Just after Kim Jong Il's death, the official news agency put out an article saying that under Kim Jong Il's rule, the people had been like naive children without a care in the world.

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

Irishmen are not reserved, and the company appeared dying to be intimately acquainted.

We're all dying. We're all in the process of oxidizing. Everyone of us is in the process of oxidizing, so to sort of interrupt one aspect of that while everything else goes on, it's a freak show.