Africa is not a country, but it is a continent like none other. It has that which is elegantly vast or awfully little.

There will be those who will tell you that you can't make it because of how you look, because of the way you talk. We all have heard that - I almost listened.

Slavery is nothing to joke about! And the history of this nation's [the USA's] involvement with slavery is nothing to pass off in a joke.

What is blackness? Is it the way you talk? Do you got to say, 'Dey this, dey dat.' Or the way you dress? Or is it the forgiving of certain things? What is black enough?

You don't ever earn a right to stop doing anything if you feel there is an obligation to move in terms of public service.

Suppose something would happen to the president, who would be in charge? The Vice President. Joe Biden? You have got to be kidding today when you say the Taliban's not our enemy.

In the class that I teach at one University, I stress that my one-word definition of politics is money. You can't name a subject matter that money doesn't touch.

My experience politically has always been that one-word definition of politics: money. Keep your eye on the buck. And that tells you where the American people are going to be.

The first black president will be a politician who is black.

Certain black leaders would believe that you have to go through their prism: 'If I lay my hand on you, you're OK.' So many people have made a living off of the pimping of race.

Many voted in 2008 with the desire to see racism and racists humiliated by having a qualified black man elected president.

The reason that so many fail to find happiness is that they fail to find gratitude.

Death lasts only a moment, but we think about it every moment. (La mort ne dure qu'un instant, - Mais on y pense chaque instant)

Acting can be pretty challenging. I can't say making a romantic comedy is challenging, but to do anything well, you have to put yourself into it.

That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.

Praise becomes compulsory when we experience true intimacy [with God].

In my work, I wanted something irreducible, an absence of the gimmicky and clever.

Publishers are all cohorts of the devil; there must be a special hell for them somewhere.

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

Enthusiasm brushes off upon those with whom you come in contact.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.