Maybe I'm just sensitive to that person who's on the outside.

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.

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.

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.

Always, my mother said, "Be yourself." That is sometimes the hardest thing to do. I try to always remember that and come back to that and have strength in who you are. There is only one you.

Go to lots of interviews, at least one a month even when you don't need a job, to keep in training for when you do.

On a biological level, the brain registers money as something valuable - even a dollar bill which has no intrinsic value, it's just paper.

A perfect mind comes from a perfect heart, not the heart known by a doctor's stethoscope but the heart which is the seat of God.

I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed.

Well mine is not gimmicky - it is the 6 food groups that God made, and exercising every day. Trying to think positively.

Babies need social interactions with loving adults who talk with them, listen to their babblings, name objects for them, and give them opportunities to explore their worlds.

Man is a mimic animal, happiest acting a part, needing a mask to tell the truth.

The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.

I'm not an experimental artist. I have no talent for that. I need a certain kind of antecedent form to follow.