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.

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.'

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.

I'm a draftsperson. And also, I really respond to love.

Knowledge is light.

No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any.

If there’s any trick to doing a job you hate . . . Mrs. Clark says it’s to find a job you hate even more.

A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.

I try not to read the social networks too much. I find that way madness lies.

If I were an opera singer, I"d have sung you an aria. If I were an artist, I would have painted your portrait. But cooking is what I'm best at.

There is a need, especially right now in America, to be a bit provocative.

[Turkish women] had lived free of the veil for 5,000 years, and had been covered only in the last 600 years.

It's no use blaming anyone now.

Grace tried is better than grace, and more than grace; it is glory in its infancy