I wondered then why children played so in the river, but adults ceased to see it with the same eyes. Why couldn't we embrace such simple joys?

Ultimately, my love saved me, for my love gave me strength. At night, when sleep was sunwilling to rescue me, I gritted my teeth and devoured my fondest memories.

Lesson number one, she muttered, love is beyond your grasp. Lesson two: nowhere is it written that you're guaranteed fairness. And three: there's only right and wrong.

I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.

My parents were very firm about me always getting my homework done.

I was always the only black in the movie theater, the only black in class, the only black in the library, the only black in the discotheque. I always felt observed and judged.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

I'm lost in the woods right now.

To pray is, first of all, to let one's mind be empty. It is to cast aside for a while "the self" that has existed until now, letting only God live in one's heart.

Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life.

Risk in art is experimentation. There is no sorrow in self-driven experimentation.

Overall my race hasn't been a problem. I'm a black artist with white skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what's in your own soul.