Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.

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

The American idea is as promising, imaginative, and full of the unexpected as the land itself. The land represents freedom - the frontier, the ability to make a new future with your own bare hands.

Hope is when you look out the window and you go, 'It doesn't look good at all, but I'm going to go beyond what I see to give people visions of what could be.'

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.

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.

I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.