STEPHEN CARTER

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

When you shoot someone who is fleeing, it's not self-defense. It's an execution.

More than 20 years on, sustained competition, informed customers and the rapid growth of new technology provide the necessary environment for substantial deregulation.

In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

Even in 2012, if there's a black character in the movies or on television that's a professional, if we even hear about their backgrounds they're always 'up from the streets.'

There are no black conservatives. Oh, there are neoconservatives with black skin, but they lack any claim to blackness other than the biological. They have forgotten their roots.

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

Teaching civility is an obligation of the family.

If you're fascinated by America, you'll be fascinated by family.

I say disallegiance rather than disobedience to emphasize the distinction between breaking the law—disobedience—and rejecting the sovereign’s claim to sovereignty—disallegiance …. We need disobedience and we should not be so quick to assume that disobedience is the same as disallegiance.

If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future?

You should never fall in love with your own press clippings, because it is very much the nature of the beast that the same journalists who build you up between Monday and Friday tear you down for weekend fun...

Human history can be viewed as an endless search for greater order.

Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available.

None of us are gossips, but we love listening to those who are.

We live today in a world in which nobody believes choices should have consequences. But may I tell you the great secret that our culture seeks to deny? You cannot escape the consequences of your choices. Time runs in only one direction.

The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear - that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy - is one of their strengths.

Rumors chase the dead like flies, and we follow them with our prim noses. None of us are gossips, but we love listening to those who are.

True love is not the helpless desire to possess the cherished object of one's fervent affection; true love is the disciplined generosity we require of ourselves for the sake of another when we would rather be selfish; that, at least, is how I have taught myself to love my wife.

There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.

We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed.

Richard John Neuhaus, in his well-known book The Naked Public Square, tells us that in America, the public square has become openly hostile to religion.