You can never give complete authority and overall power to anyone until trust can be proven.

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

I wasn't always black... there was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

It isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that's beautiful.

The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it.

How did I prepare for night shifts? When I was a small, anxious kid, I checked my mom in her sleep to make sure she was still breathing.

It is the heart that is unsure of its God that is afraid to laugh.

[Admiral Sir Erasmus Gower] 'No other contemporary officer approached his accumulated experience...' From Champion of the Quarterdeck: Admiral Sir Erasmus Gower 1742-1814.

I was thinking about the first time I ever saw you and how after that I couldn't forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn't stop myself.

Painting completed my life.

I think that Hollywood is content with condescending to Black people, patronizing them, feeling sorry for us, and I think we're happy to take the pat on the head as a people and take whatever awards.

I'm just a regular guy that had a dream and ran for it.

Bands are like people. They're born and then they die.

There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.

As an artist, you have a choice. That gave me the freedom to do what I want to.