Poverty makes it very difficult in an already competitive world for kids to get on a straight track where they can actually love learning.

I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.

We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.

I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.

Listening is not just hearing what someone tells you word for word. You have to listen with a heart. I don't want that to sound touchy-feely; it is not. It is very hard work.

We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair . . . pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities . . . We have to create our own standards of discipline.

You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, it's hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.