I was an original Elvis fan. He was the voice of my generation. I was listening to him on the radio when he released his great Sun records with Scotty Moore on electric guitar and Bill Black on bass.
Then, as the day progresses, depending on how the product is coming in - for instance, the fish man will fax us and say black bass is great - throughout the day, we'll also make judgment calls and adapt to what's available.
Like all rice, black rice is great at absorbing flavours, but it's just as happy to act as a satiny bed for a poached egg, say, if you want to keep things simple.
I don't look to a man to get pride in myself. It's not about having a black president, it's about having a good president, and I think that's the most important thing.
I mean, I'm pretty good in real life, but sometimes people seem surprised that I'm like a normal teenager and wear black nail polish and I'm just a little bit more edgy than the person I play on television.
We never considered ourselves to be a good band or anything, we just thought we were playing for fun and we wanted to play music that sounded like Black Sabbath or Soundgarden or the music we were into at that time.
I'm persuaded that sports is the one place where the rules are pretty well set out, where fans are equal. And if you got game or you're a good official, you make it here, whether you're white or you're black.
The Sixth Sense is not a good white film. Insomnia is not a good white film. They're just good films. So why we can't we have good films that happen to have black people, or Asian, or Latino, or any other minority group in them?
I don't want people to go to a film of mine because they feel guilty, like, 'I have to support it because there's black folks in there.' I want them to go because it's a good movie.
I think one of the reasons that I got so good at it, as somebody making radio stories, is that on the radio I can actually - I can understand what's happening in the interview and can make a connection in a way that makes sense.
But the good news is that out in the countryside, just about every place that's got a zip code has somebody or some group of people battling the economic and political exclusion that Wall Street and Washington are shoving down our throats.
You know, I'm the 1st black solo MC from Detroit. I didn't do the 50 Cent sales but hey... I got a long career, I'm still young and I'm trying to bring really good music.
I like stories of the classic hero, of good versus evil, the ones in which the good guys wear white and the bad guys wear black... and I love a good sword fight.
You don't want to have so much money going toward your mortgage every month that you can't enjoy life or take care of your other financial responsibilities.
From racial profiling and being pulled over just for 'driving while black' to this new phenomenon of killing unarmed people out of some preconceived idea of fear, our lives and our children's lives are not being valued.
My biggest fear was public speaking, and then having everyone know who I was, it was definitely weird at first. When I first won, it was definitely a culture shock, it was something I wasn't quite ready for.
Fear is the culprit that robs us of our greatest lives. And although it's mostly made up or a learned behavior from our past, almost everybody I've ever met in my life struggles with fear.
The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow.
What you believe is very powerful. If you have toxic emotions of fear, guilt and depression, it is because you have wrong thinking, and you have wrong thinking because of wrong believing.
'Toy Story' we found, sorta by accident, because we didn't know what we were doing, the idea of being replaced by somebody. Everybody has that fear, or encounters this jealousy at some point.
I love the fact that we, as black people, carry our faith with us. We share it and embrace it and love it and talk about it because we talk about everything else and why not that and that was the first impression that I had that really touched me.
