I don't do the things other people call "play."

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative - no author does, I can tell you - you could nevertheless create it.

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

Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself

Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.