It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

---

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

---

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

---

All important things are hard.

---

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

---

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

---

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.

---

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

---

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

---

Laughter is more serious than tears.

---