My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.

You should not pick an occupation because your think your parents want you to do it, or because you think it's the noble thing to do. You should only pick a job because it turns you on.

The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.

That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

I have no plans to slow down.

For black America needs a politics whose first mission isn't the reinforcement of the idea of black America; and a discourse of race that isn't centrally concerned with preserving the idea of race and racial unanimity. We need something we don't yet have: a way of speaking about black poverty that doesn't falsify the reality of black advancement; a way of speaking about black advancement that doesn't distort the enduring realities of black poverty.