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.

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.

In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history.

I think everybody focuses on race, but it's about a ton of things, and I just see these things as all interrelated and all interwoven in a weird way.

No innocent person ever has an alibi.

Well, what I tried to do is simply to get out on the land. And when I came to Washington, I think one of the mistakes we made early on was kind of having an ideological dispute up in the Congress.

You go up for hundreds, thousands of roles, and you get told no, no, no, so many times.

I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.

The reason why lovers are never bored together is that they are always talking of themselves.

It is our duty to be faithful, not with eye service as men pleasers.

When child actors act well they're just reacting to situations, and they're acting very real because their life experience is so short; there's no history to fall back on.

The last I heard from my destiny, it wanted me to make a legal U-Turn at my next opportunity.

Fraternity without absorption, union without fusion.