The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies

As he drifted off, his father came to visit him, clothed in all his possible shapes.

Isn’t that the fantasy? If I go back in time, knowing what people back then didn’t know, then I can change history! But history made you what you are. And it’s bigger than any one man.

This is the last moment of contentment untainted by sorrow, when the brain hesitates before delivering the message to the heart that it knows it must.

But life isn't neat the way a story is. And if you try to pretend it is, then you just make yourself unhappy, or screw yourself over.

I like Carson. I really like Carson. I can hand an idea to him that's still a little rough, and he can turn it over and tumble it and hand it back to me shining. And I can do the same for him.

But who, in these modern times, slept well?

I can’t comprehend why any black man with even a lick of sense would have the slightest bit of interest in time travel. Going backward in time? A black man? You have got to be out of your mind.

Later—how much later? Hard to tell. In times of tragedy clocks will trick you—Philip stood in the kitchen doorway.

If the worst thing a physicist could say about a statement is that it was “false, ” the best thing he could say is that it was “interesting.

She hadn't gone back in time. The idea was

Genuine faith comes forth from the iron smelter of affliction.

What you might see as depravity is, to me, just another aspect of the human condition.

A remarkable documentary and the first in-depth record of many black women, slave and free.

Many women dress for men before marriage, and for women after marriage.

If your life doesn't end in failure, you haven't reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.

I do hope I play out the contradictions that I feel, all the anxieties and dilemmas. If they're there in the work, then that's brilliant.

There is no such thing as real happiness in life. The justest definition that was ever given of it was "a tranquil acquiescence under an agreeable delusion"--I forget where.

In business, competition is never as healthy as total domination.

We're releasing hardened criminals from jails all over California. They don't have the money. They don't have the room anymore. The jails are overflowing so we gotta get rid of somebody.

There's always something more to be accomplished with a character. Theater is a human experience. There's nothing shellacked or finished off about it. I guess that's why it always draws me back.