I'm not a lawyer, but I play one in my novel COPYRIGHT. I also play a serial rapist, a drug addict, a teenage boy and lesbian model.
I was never pretty enough to be the pretty girl and I was never quirky enough to be the quirky girl. Boys didn't look at me in high school and think I was the pretty girl.
I didn't feel like going any further in this scene with the boy. He was not a professional actor, and if I had pushed the scene any further it would have destroyed the tone of the movie.
I listened to a lot of Jay-Z and Kanye coming up, which would be unexpected for a boy bander like me. But I'd listen to a lot of that, and a lot of Ed Sheeran, actually.
My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.
Black people lived right by the railroad tracks, and the train would shake their houses at night. I would hear it as a boy, and I thought: I'm gonna make a song that sounds like that.
An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.
I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.
Rest until you feel like playing, then play until you feel like resting, period. Never do anything else.
If you want to end your isolation, you must be honest about what you want at a core level and decide to go after it.
Focusing on one mildly disturbing, semi-controllable issue allows the mind to stuff much greater terrors in relatively tidy packages.
You get social pressure from your parents, who teach you to pay attention to certain things and not to others. You get it in school.
If Rosa Parks had taken a poll before she sat down in the bus in Montgomery, she'd still be standing.
The Founding Fathers would be sorry to see that America had become so divided and factionalized.
Hip-hop has globalized a conception of blackness that has had a political impact, whether or not it had a political intent.
I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.
White-on-white crime is a devastation in America like so-called black-on-black crime. It's not black or white-on-white crime. It's proximity murder.
Well you know boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like women. You just have to read the manual and press the right button.
Little girls and boys, barefooted, walked up and down between the endless rows of spindles, reaching thin little hands into the machinery to repair snapped threads.
I didn't know how I could want things so badly while making it impossible to ever get them.
Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?
