Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

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."

My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.

It's a real stumper to sit around and try to think in your own head, but when you go into somebody else's head that takes the foot off the breaks. You can think in someone else's head.

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

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.