I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.

I think you're not really teaching anyone unless you're learning yourself.

For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.

I was so well loved by my mother that if people have any expectations of me I really don't notice because I'm hardest on myself.

Inspiration takes many forms, but it's rarely pure.

Challenging is good, like good conversation, yes? Who wants to have dinner with the same old easy listening music sounding friends all the time?

One of the things I noticed when I worked at Vibe was that backstage at a fashion show, they always referred to the black models as "black girls." I thought, "They never say 'white girls.'

Images are really powerful. People fall in love with images, and as a way of falling in love with someone because they're like an image.

People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.

Who says reading should be easy? Shouldn't it challenge you as hard sometimes as love. Maybe "hard" is not the right word in this context. Ha!

There were so few black men who were successful and who successfully conveyed black male fear - how America can make you feel crazy, and how America can create interesting levels of contradiction.

To live, to TRULY live, we must be willing to RISK. To be nothing in order to find everything. To leap before we look.

To try to help people have babies in a healthy way and to celebrate the process of delivering a child which will be healthy is, I think, almost the best part of healthcare.

In each big decision, we'll always make them by faith.

I can still fit into my Battlestar Galactica costume!

A marciful Providunce fashioned us holler O' purpose thet we might our principles swaller.

Usually, the team that turns the ball over less will hold on to the ball more

Barack Obama is the New Generation and the hot light of a dawn that goes way beyond clever talk of morning in America.

I'm sure there are people who think I only do music, people who think I only do theater, and people who think I only do dramatic stuff. I do things that interest me.

All this has been my fault.

The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.