It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it.

People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.

I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .

Why are the mainstream buzz things rarely contemporary? It doesn't happen very often. It's hard to feel culpable or implicated or even apathetic.

I think there's nothing new going on. Except that, you're even more public than you've ever been.There's some good and some bad to that.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history.

I think everybody focuses on race, but it's about a ton of things, and I just see these things as all interrelated and all interwoven in a weird way.

As long as one sees faults with the world, he prevails in the knowledge of the senses. The inner purification has not yet occurred in him.

A woman who's self confident doesn't need to compete with other females. She knows her worth and lives a purpose filled life.

If you decide to run for the leadership, you have to go through it with the people you love. But you also have to protect them and I am determined to protect my mum.

You know that, according to quantum theory, if two particles collide with enough energy you can, in principle, with an infinitesimal probability, produce two grand pianos.

Adversity is the refiner's fire that bends iron but tempers steel.

My nemesis - my downfall, if you will - was relationships, and trying to fulfill them.

The problems that I really like to solve are our cultural problems.

There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.

Nothing is ever cut-and-dried. There's anguish behind everything.

Don't let the bad shots get to you. Don't let yourself become angry. The true scramblers are thick-skinned. And they always beat the whiners.