The one thing you'll notice when you're walking through Harlem is every single passing car is playing different music and there's also music that's being played out of windows.

I've just never seen a live event [like Oscar] where the emotional swings - it was just stunning.And it was interesting because, on one hand, "Moonlight" is one of these, like, generational pictures that you wanted to see win. But at the same time, if "La La Land" had won, I completely understood.

Harlem is filled with moments of history.

The Academy Awards for people in Hollywood is like the Super Bowl, the presidential inauguration and winning the NBA championship rolled up into one.

If you're black living in the community and you want to change things, there are going to be things that happen. That's true of anybody. I mean you could use celebrity as a similar metaphor.

The only thing I can worry about is my swimming pool and keeping the leaves out of my swimming pool. I can't worry about what's happened to my neighbors.

If you think about black art, all black art, whether it's Invisible Man or whether it's James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, or Richard Wright, they all deal with elements of identity and trying to humanize our experience and our struggle in the world where people have been indifferent to who we are and what we are. It's basically just saying that our lives have meaning.