My mother loved my father. From my view, she let him get away with too much. It broke my heart to see him in an old people's home and stop being strong and lose his voice.

To be a survivor as an African American man - maybe any man - you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that's what we all understand.

I can't pretend that I did one really awful thing - I took a bite out of the apple but now I'm never going to sin again.

You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We're dreamers and - since we only have one life, and if we screw up we can get in a world of trouble - we're very intense dreamers. That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is. There is no American or Frenchhistory. There are all these dreams that are floating around. People construct them and fight with them and criticize them, and the world goes on. I don't think the stars pay much attention.

That split is inside all Americans. There are contradictions inside all of us about color and race. We've learned to cover them up and live with them and pretend that deep cleavage is not there. We all bear that illness.

My father combined many of the elements that were feared in the culture, but also he was a warm figure, a figure we needed. We depended on him to give us a little bit of strength and courage.