I think the lie we've told people in the marketplace is that a degree gets you a job. A degree doesn't get you a job. What gets you a job is the ability to carry yourself into that room and shake a hand and look someone in the eye and have people ski...
One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bo...
When the culture is strong, you've got this consistency where black people can grow up in these places with this voice just resonating about our special-ness in the universe. And I always say you're in trouble if you get too far away from that core t...
We feel like 'Lost' deserved a real resolution, not a 'snow globe, waking up in bed, it's all been a dream, cut to black' kind of ending. We thought that would be kind of a betrayal to an audience that's been on this journey for six years. We thought...
Growing up with Bronx Irish parents during an era of protests against the status quo, I was especially committed to doing the opposite of what I was told to do. Forty-four years later, I am left with only one means of making a living: comedy.
Sometimes the emptiness in a room becomes palpable as if you could reach out and touch it real, hear its silence, feel its black nothingness. It invades your spirit, your soul like a stealthy misperception; a liquid lie that whispers and will not die...
Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America. And then it goes back to slavery. And I'm sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I'm a b...
I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely a...
The Democratic Party has taken the black community for granted and said, 'This is the most loyal constituency we have. They're not going anywhere.' But the Republican Party has said, 'That's the most loyal constituency Democrats have. They're not goi...
I also believe that you are what you have to defend, and if you're a black man that's always going to be the bar against which you are judged, whether you want to align yourself with those themes or not. You can think of yourself as a colourless pers...
In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the commun...
I recall the story of the philosopher and the theologian... The two were engaged in disputation and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher resembling a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat — which wasn't there. ‘That m...
When I go in to see people - and I sell an occasional ad now - I never say, 'Help me because I am black' or 'Help me because I am a minority.' I always talk about what we can do for them.
Men and women in my lifetime have died fighting for the right to vote: people like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered while registering black voters in Mississippi in 1964, and Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered by the ...
Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spok...
Most of the time, particularly with this record, 'The Light of the Sun,' I really just been standing in front of a microphone and blacking out musically, you know. I'd come back a couple hours later and there's six songs from beginning to end, you kn...
Please, all you MCs out there, all you fans out there, don't think Big gonna make a record dissing 2Pac or the West Coast because it's not going down like that. I cant even see me wasting my time or my talent to disrespect another black man.
Flanagan: The D.A's squad loses its lead investigator next month. Rick is quite adamant that his replacement be a person of color. It's a high profile position, and he wants to send the right message to the community. Graham: And the right message is...
Zoo Keeper: Story goes, these great big rats come scuttling off the slave ships and raped all the little tree monkeys. The natives use them in black magic rituals. Don't ask me how, probably suck the blood of virgins, eh, eh?
[last lines] Harry: [voice-over] I solemnly swear that I am up to no good. [writing appears, and the credits roll to end] Harry: Mischief managed. [the writing on the parchment fades away] Harry: Nox. [fade to black]
Thranduil: Such is the nature of evil. Out there in the vast ignorance of the world it festers and spreads. A shadow that grows in the dark. A sleepless malice as black as the oncoming wall of night. So it ever was. So will it always be. In time all ...
