Let your face speak what's in your heart.

You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.

The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.