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.

One of the things that's really the cornerstone of '90s hip-hop is sampling.

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

75%-90% of the murders that occur in black and Latino communities are solvable. Everybody knows who did it or somebody knows. The reason nobody talks is because snitches get stitches and people aren't bulletproof.

I mean, we should only be talking about the merits of film ["Moonlight"] because one of the great things about the visual language is that it is the great equalizer.

That's one thing that you notice in New York that you don't notice in LA is how much music is all over the place.