So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.

For me, a garden is peace of mind. It immediately takes my mind off the thing I'm puzzling about in my work and gives me repose.

Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.

I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that's a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there's a culture of poverty. I know that I've seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they're systematically deprived, whether it's getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we're talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too.

We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used DNA analysis. The technology was just being invented that allowed you to trace ancestry through DNA.

The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.