I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.
When I was 10 or 11, my grandmother had a scarf. It was black, but a long one. I used to wrap it around my head and say to them that 'I'm a cleric, you need to pray behind me.'
Sean Connery wasn't the Scottish James Bond and Daniel Craig wasn't the blue-eyed James Bond. So if I played him, I don't want to be called the black James Bond.
Traditional broadcast media seems old-fashioned and vague to me. When I watch television news, I'm aware of what skilled journalists they are, but I find it hard because of the corny way they present it.
One reason I do the live shows - and the monthly speeches at public radio stations - is to remind myself that people hear the show, that it has an audience, that it exists in the world. It's so easy to forget that.
For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It's a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person, and things happen to them, and then something big happens, and they realize something new.
My first job on the radio was writing jokes for a Baltimore DJ called Johnny Walker, who was sort of a '70s era shock jock who all the teenage boys listened to in my school.
I'm a reporter - if I don't interview someone, I don't have much to say, and I definitely can't just sit down and knock out 800 words on any subject you give me.
Monofilament is what you use to go fishing. The line on your fishing rod is probably going to be black. You get to the end of the line and you tie on this clear plastic, thin thread called monofilament.
The sea stood up before him, foaming, torn by lightning bolts, opening terrifying mouths that gobbled up the dense, hard black rains unleashed by the sky like hate.
Yet a mysterious gate lay open within her shadow; and all my flesh was aware of black pathways and hovels and the silence one observes when the dead are near.
I'm half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That's why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I've seen so many.
The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian.
I'm from the South, where if you walk down the street and there's somebody behind you talking with a Southern accent, you can't tell whether it's a black or a white person.
I have a bee in my bonnet as to how few black historical figures one sees on film; incredible stories, stories from which we are living the legacy and which just don't get made.
Without aging white males, I doubt the 'New York Times' would survive. How many young people, females, Hispanics and blacks subscribe to the 'New York Times?'
It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to think of myself as someone who was part of a larger struggle.
I injured myself politically when I took on Jesse Jackson' in the 1988 presidential campaign. I was too strident. I didn't recognize the emotional tie that he had with all black voters.
But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.
I think we're doing the right things for the right reasons. We're not doing it to sell products. We're not doing it to be popular. We're doing it because in our judgment these stories are important to do, and at this length and this much depth.
The institutionalization of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, all of these things, led to a sense that the struggle was over for a lot of people and that one did not have to continue the personal consciousness-raising and changing of one's viewpoint.
