Our stories come from our lives and from the playwright's pen, the mind of the actor, the roles we create, the artistry of life itself and the quest for peace.

Always in the black spirituals there's that promise that things are going to be better, by and by.

We are not our brother’s keeper we are our brother and we are our sister. We must look past complexion and see community.

No sun outlasts its sunset, but will rise again and bring the dawn.

I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

Love liberates. It doesn't just hold - that's ego. Love liberates. It doesn't bind.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.