For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.

I think you're not really teaching anyone unless you're learning yourself.

I was so well loved by my mother that if people have any expectations of me I really don't notice because I'm hardest on myself.

Inspiration takes many forms, but it's rarely pure.

Challenging is good, like good conversation, yes? Who wants to have dinner with the same old easy listening music sounding friends all the time?

One of the things I noticed when I worked at Vibe was that backstage at a fashion show, they always referred to the black models as "black girls." I thought, "They never say 'white girls.'

Images are really powerful. People fall in love with images, and as a way of falling in love with someone because they're like an image.

People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.

Who says reading should be easy? Shouldn't it challenge you as hard sometimes as love. Maybe "hard" is not the right word in this context. Ha!

There were so few black men who were successful and who successfully conveyed black male fear - how America can make you feel crazy, and how America can create interesting levels of contradiction.

I'm a draftsperson. And also, I really respond to love.

Do not trust to the cheering, for those persons would shout as much if you and I were going to be hanged.

Remember that it is not enough to abstain from lying by word of mouth; for the worst lies are often conveyed by a false look, smile, or act.

An English philosopher said that whatever is cosmic is also comic. Do the best you can and don't take it so seriously.

It's what I've learned over the years that has pushed me beyond limits.

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment.

Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.

We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre, any day of the week that we want to give them their head.

My, aren't we bossy today. Give a girl an army and it goes straight to her head.

Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.

If you loose the sounds comming out of New Orleans, you loose apart of the american language.