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.

I'm not interested in food. It's just fuel.

My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are."

The black church will accept anybody.

If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.

I think comedy allows people to accept the more difficult parts of history. And history, if it's presented wrong, is just very depressing, particularly the history of slavery. If slavery is presented properly, it's a great story. But I think that within the commercial world of storytelling in which I live, there haven't been many strong works that discuss slavery in ways that are palatable and funny and interesting to the reader.

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.