It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand there and lie about who you actually are. That's the trap.

What gardening teaches us is that if you plant things, they'll come up. But you have to be willing to wait for them to bear fruit because things are seasonal.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Freedom, after all, is like love: the more you give to others, the more you have.

It's almost unbelievable where we are as a planet because people have been so afraid of rocking the boat, of putting forth what they really believe, and standing with people who need to be stood with.

What I am really interested in is that I want people to be thinking in other ways - to stop thinking they have to remain glued to a system that has failed and to ideas about society that's necessarily about being run by Democrats or Republicans.

Our problem mostly in our abuse of each other and the planet is greed. Just the rampant, incredible greed that people have partly because they're empty and they can't get enough because they're - you know, it's that Buddhist thing about the hungry ghost with the little mouth and the big belly.