If I didn't have so much of this life all wrong I would have gotten it right by now.

The future gets no say in who we are.

Pretend – inside your skin – you've got a friend, who's willing to give you everything you ever wanted in exchange for all you've ever been.

Stop inviting walls into wide open spaces.

What paper planes and empty seats most have in common is that they are best made by children still learning how to ride things out.

Hearts don't break, y'all. They bruise and get better.

I am standing like shoe polish on an overstocked shelf hoping that one day someone will pick me to make things better.

If you've never been rocked back by the presence of purpose this poem is too soon for you. Return to your mediocrity, plug it into an amplifier and rethink yourself.

The first time my town saw the sky it sucker-punched us in the throat, left us breathless, said, I'm gonna keep you awake some nights without touching you. You'll make it up, the pain, you always do.

You are the home I point to that lives in my chest.

I'm ready to kill something. I'll probably only get as far as my brain cells, but I am going to kill them.

Isn't wine prohibited here?" the boy asked. "It's not what enters men's mouths that's evil, " said the alchemist. "It's what comes out of their mouths that is.

You can choose to say, "Good Morning God" or "Good God, morning!

Humility is, in a sense, admitting how egotistical you are.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.

Listening to great music and art inspires me and recharges me.

In all American professional sports you start on a certain level and you have to work your way up through a farm system. It's really the same in acting.

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.

The wisest advice I ever received regarding the kitchen came from my mother: 'Do the dishes while you're cooking.

I have no desire to go anywhere near drugs. People say, "Aren't you tempted?" No, because of the ridiculousness of it.

Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.