When I was a kid, my grandfather said that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you." Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country.

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

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 would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn't have the resources to do that.

People realize that we're very good at sending people to war, but we're not good at taking care of them. And people are coming back from war now; years ago, they would have been killed, now they're wounded; and they're coming back alive and with post-traumatic stress. So, I think Americans are sensible enough to know we've got to figure out a way to take care of them.

Some people study a text very deeply. The people are my text. I study their words and what their words sound like, over and over again.

You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.