The individuals inside are frequently fighting that their individual voices be heard, while the walls of the place, which are the mask, and the perception, are reluctant to give over to the voices of...
Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.
We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.
Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.
Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awakening...
I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write abo...
I think we can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment they they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It's...
Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character l...
The American idea is as promising, imaginative, and full of the unexpected as the land itself. The land represents freedom - the frontier, the ability to make a new future with your own bare hands.
Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.
Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.
Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you. Go for that communion, that real communion with your soul, and the discipline of expressing that communion with others...
I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.
I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went o...
President Obama called for a 'we' nation in his Inauguration Address. Art convenes. It is not just inspirational. It is aspirational. It pricks the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opens our hear...
I said, Los Angeles burned but Los Angeles is but one city experiencing this kind of hopelessness and despair, I said, and we need a job program with stipends … I said, These young people really, ya k...
I think we need leadership that helps us remember that part of what we are about is caring about more than the person right next to us, but the folks across the way.
I think it's really important to give yourself a very big question that you're working on that you can come home to, even if you, you know, are going to have to go without a cup of coffee or even a me...
My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.
People who are sick, or who have been sick, or have come close to death have a lot to say - and they want you to hear it.