“Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.”

I woke to the sound of rain.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, This is what it is to be happy.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

A man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted and spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.

Intoxicated with madness, I’m in love with my sadness.

Together we are strong.

My parents taught me never to judge others based on whom they love, what color their skin is, or their religion.

I wish to raise a Black man who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own Black self.

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.

The industry looks for white actors and actresses, but it’s not the same for black actors. We have to really put the work in.

The projects that I end up doing, that I want to be involved with in any way, have always been projects that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people – to black people.

My job is to be the constructive awakener of the black masses of the world so them know themself and others know what black people suppose to be and where.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.