We all experience power struggles in our lives - at the workplace, with our friends, in our love lives. In a way, we're all politicians.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won't meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It's the perversion of idealism.

If you work hard and play by the rules, you'll have a better life than your parents did, and your children will have a better life than you did.

In the best possible scenario, whenever you get notes from people, they're good notes, and they see things that you wouldn't have seen otherwise, and they make you a better writer.

My jobs on campaigns were pretty low on the totem pole - I was an advance man.

When you're creating new roles out of scratch in my opinion working with the actors is a great asset. You can learn a lot from that.

I don't think that Washington is a fundamentally bad or corrupt place.

You just have to re-wire your brain when you’re shifting from the stage to the screen, or the silver screen or the HD flat screen.

The checks and balances is a way to prevent government from either devolving into an autocratic tyranny or an autocratic mob mentality.

It finally was entirely silent and I inhaled and breathed its magical peace...

maybe if people weren't so careless, then nothing would need to be caged.

There will be no white flag above my door, I'm in love and always will be

Most violence is intra-racial, and much of the violence in African-American communities is a function of drug availability, joblessness and poverty.

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.

The Republicans are the party of bad ideas. The Democrats are the party of no ideas.

Many frequently change their principles, but seldom their practices.

I keep all my poems in my journals and lock them away. They are the start of everything.

I'd forgotten how arrogant people are in the theater, I'm agreeing to starve for a year and he seems to think I should be pleased to have the part.

Winning that first game was so important; my mother always said that the first game of the second set was the chance to keep it going if you were ahead or change things if you were behind.