To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed.

I had learned something of Miami from people who had visited there, so I knew what to expect.

Of all my father's teachings, the most enduring was the one about the true measure of a man. That true measure was how well he provided for his children, and it stuck with me as if it were etched in my brain.

Far as I can tell, I still have most of my hair, my gut is not hanging over my belt, and I still have all of my teeth.

We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.

I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.