All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.

Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.

Better to listen to the gospel than to a mortal leader.

The fear in my heart was like in one of those dreams where you try to run but you can't do it, you can't run because the fear is an anchor in your chest.

I think that people don't know how to do anything anymore. My father was a janitor. He could take a car apart and put it back together. He could build a house in the back yard. Today, if you ask people what they know, they say, 'I know how to hire someone.'

I think that it's important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don't think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel.

The police and I have a deal. I don't talk to them and they don't listen to me.