I think it's cultural racism more than anything, which dovetails with actual racism, but the cultural racism to me is even more shocking.

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

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 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.

Faith is accepting what makes no sense, what we cannot prove, but know down deep in our souls is real.

I want to make people laugh.

Do stupid stuff and even stupider suff will happen to you.

The truest mark of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy.

My hunger and curiosity drive me forward in all directions at once.

Straw purchasing is illegal.

When a man puts on a Character he is a stranger to, there's as much difference between what he appears, and what he is really in himself, as there is between a VIzor and a Face.

Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with reference to them, a simple commodity.

The skill set for hockey is so specific to skating and if you haven’t been skating as a kid it’s impossible to play - and I wasn’t a skater.

There are too many possibilities, if you can't die. If you're playing a normal human being, there's always that.