It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way.

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.

And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!

The highest result of education is tolerance

I wouldn't say that I've mellowed. I'm less mellow, perhaps.

I don't want to have so much humor [in films] that it undermines the jeopardy, but enough to sometime relieve tension.

Fear is bred from ignorance. So knowledge is a weapon against it, and reason is the tool of knowledge.

The key is to do your own work.

My limo driver's white, my attorney black... 'Show me some love' like I'm Bernie Mac.

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

Any human being who is becoming independent of conditionings, of religions, scriptures, prophets and messiahs, has arrived home. He has found the treasure which was hidden in his own being.

Ready to be humiliated, Wanda?" Wes taunted. "You may have taken the planet, but you're losing this game.