New Orleans in an amazing town.

I'd consider myself a flailing comedy writer.

You know, 1% of us is in the armed forces, protecting the other 99, and they're all volunteers.

The only thing more intimidating than a huge international film star is your mother-in-law.

Part of your job as an artist is to push yourself and make sure your creative juices are flowing.

You learn history in school, and you have a reverential feeling toward it. But by being irreverent, it feels current.

You never can take for granted that you have a job.

You never know when you'll have a bad idea for a worse joke.

You think of George Washington, this man who was larger than life, and in some ways he was. But at the same time, he's just a person.

If it doesn't feel like a job and I'm learning something and getting that rush that I get, I don't care if it's behind a camera, on a TV set, or on the moon.

Maybe I'm naive, but I subscribe to the idea that nobody is actually making strategic decisions about their career. Trying to do that would be like playing three-card monte on Canal Street.

For adventure is not outside a man it is within.

We can become so cruel and so selfish when we are afraid.

Real leaders focus resources in areas that provide the greatest opportunity rather than making across-the-board decisions.

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

You are not suffering yesterday or tomorrow. You are only suffering your memory and your imagination.

If we want know the meaning of existence, we must open a book: over there, in the darkest chapter, there’s a sentence written especially for us.

If you like good ol' fashion Southern soul food then, yes, I am a good cook! My specialty is chicken dumplings and poke salad.

Do yourself a favor; don’t wear yourself out trying to please everybody. Your time is too valuable.

The fact that when we die we are nothing more than worm meat---I just don't think about it.

I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.