The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.

God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.

I asked her if I was black or white. She replied "You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.

People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.

I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn't count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.

I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.

It is hard to find romance in the present because there's nothing left to the imagination.

God, he was probably too young to be this old, but life had a way of being about experience, rather than calendar days.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

My parents got married late and they had kids late, so I never felt a social or cultural thing to be married or pregnant or a homeowner by a certain age.

To be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what can be done to you, of what is seen as abuse of you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status.

It wasn't that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.

Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.

The sterilization of men is one method of birth control. The surest, most radical method. To you it seems dreadful. To me it seems that, properly applied, it's by no means dreadful.

There's a lot of political things happening out there that I'd really have to get away from.

I'm no stranger to the occasional dodgy juice, but it doesn't taste very nice and it is bloody boring. It's not a way to live.

I went to public school up until junior high.