What humor allows you to do is to let the past go with less pain. It's a healing element. It releases some of the pain from the shotgun wound.

It is hard to find romance in the present because there's nothing left to the imagination.

It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.

My whole family was - we grew up in New York, but all my relatives and all my father and stepfather's family, they were all from the South. So I like that old Black voice, and I love the sort of old Black man with a corncob pipe, sitting there telling a whopper.

Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle.

I just read history books. I read nothing but history books. They have so much to give; I wish I'd majored in history in college.

If you're a creative person, you'd better not read what people write about you, because if it's good it'll blow your head up and it'll force you not to take the subway and you'll start taking cabs, and you'd better stay around people, and if it's bad, it just hurts your feelings so much it discourages you.