I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.

What you are will show, ultimately. Start now, every day, becoming, in your actions, your regular actions, what you would like to become in the bigger scheme of things.

I'm interested when things are upside down - because there are so many possibilities in that one moment. There is a lot that is exposed.

Identity is an assemblage of constellations.

We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.

You can't teach talent. You can't teach inspiration. You can teach people critical facilities. You can give them techniques. You can teach discipline. And you can teach them about the business.

Each person has a literature inside them.

Hope is when you look out the window and you go, 'It doesn't look good at all, but I'm going to go beyond what I see to give people visions of what could be.'

Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.

Be more than ready. Be present in your discipline. Remember your gift. Be grateful for your gift and treat it like a gift. Cherish it, take care of it, and pass it on.

You've heard that old expression from Shakespeare, 'Just speak the speech'? The words themselves will take you to the reality of the character. And so this led me to interview people.

Fear the lion, fear the crocodile, but fear most the one that puts on the inevitable wear called the human flesh.

There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present.

You don't have to turn the Page, I read the Story, it ends with you and me.

I will move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with my fathers.

I wonder why it is we are not all kinder to each other ... How much the world needs it! How easily it is done!

I'm interested in the kind of religion that makes life harder. I'm not so interested in the comforting kind of religion.

Without the benefit of Google, ask anybody to name more than five female filmmakers that have made more than three films. It's shockingly hard.

I had a newspaper in Flint, Michigan called the 'Flint Voice,' and so it was a, you know, underground, alternative newspaper that I edited and put out for about ten years.

I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.

One of the best lessons I learned early is that not everything in life is about you. It is about service. If you want trips and excessive gifts, then don't get into public service.