Suddenly in high school, I'm in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.

I think some of our most talented people are not going to pick the arts as a way that they're going to spend their lives.

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

I have a lot of optimism about new doctors because I think it's really clear that it's a lot of hard work and no guarantee of a lot of money.

President Obama called for a 'we' nation in his Inauguration Address. Art convenes. It is not just inspirational. It is aspirational. It pricks the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opens our hearts and makes us brave. And that's what we need most in our country today.

I think we can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment they they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It's the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, it's a moment when they want to communicate very badly. They're digging deep and projecting out at the same time.

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.