Here you can be a billionaire, like Mark Zuckerberg rich, but you are going to die and you are here for a while and ultimately all of your stuff is kind of like a rental.

I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.

But I have a good life. I enjoy what I do. I am married to work.

There's always going to be a need for activism; there's always going to be a need for you and me doing the right thing, being very Lincoln-sonian in looking out for each other.

People like Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and M. L. K. are larger than life to me. I find myself staring at photographs of Lincoln almost in disbelief that he was a man who walked the earth and not merely some fiction writer's creation.

In the late summer of 1986, the band I had been in for five years stopped playing. Suddenly, I was on my own. This new state of bandlessness was, at first, traumatic. When your group breaks up, a lot of broken parts hit the ground.

When you start thinking as far as what's a good photo, unfortunately everything starts looking like a good photo.