I think the museum should be an arena in which ideals can hash it out, fight it out, tooth and nail, for attention.

Black painters have done all kinds of work. It's the treatment of forms they engage in-that's what determines the value of the work, not whether you call them a black artist or not.

No one has a right to occupy the privileged position all the time, so it should be contested. It should always be messy in there.

I came in making choices about how I deploy aesthetics and imagery strategically. It seems to me that's the only legitimate way of making work.

Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.

Comics were a place where captivating images lit your imagination and showed you that you can create new kinds of people and worlds.

In some places you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. I also take into account historical realities that some of this range in color is the legacy of white supremacy.

The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.

I want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.

Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.

I really just want to be an inspiration. I'm a regular guy, that had a dream, that came from a small town, that wanted to play guitar and just liked playing. I want to encourage people.

Anger is so easy to get into and so hard to get out of.

A good attitude, a positive perspective, a smiling face, a strong laugh are all highly contagious. Why not start spreading them?

I like having written better than I like having acted.

War begun without good provision of money beforehand for going through with it is but as a breathing of strength and blast that will quickly pass away. Coin is the sinews of war.

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

You have to be concerned with yourself because if you're not on it all the time, nobody else is going to be.

I would love to be able to do both (acting and making music). If I look at someone like Sinatra, who toured until he was 80 and made 60 movies, that would be a great life to have.

Being nervous is not something you should be ashamed of. Nervous means you care, you really want to do well.

Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.

Look at the world. See the problem. And solve it