“Black audiences are hard. They always think they’re better than you. So you got to come with a little extra to satisfy them.”

When I go onstage, I want to relieve your mind, your pressures.

I’m very much disciplined because I’m more mature. When I was young I just wanted to live, I could jump, I could run, I was quick and I was relentless.

I’m an entertainer and I really enjoy entertaining. I think if you’re going to really be what you say you are, you have to really live it, work it, practice it, and think it.

I came up in the community center. I used to be physical director of the South Central Community Center in Chicago on 83rd. It’s still there. It used to be around there when I was a kid.

I became the storyteller of South Side Chicago. I used an old Kiwi liquid shoe polish as a microphone. I’d go around the house interviewing everybody, telling stupid jokes, doing voices. I mimicked Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., people on ‘Laugh-In,’ Flip Wilson.

I’ve been in training for stardom.

You know, every time it comes, every time that light comes on or every time that camera comes on, every time that microphone comes on, the Mac Man seek and destroy.

Why do people love Richard Pryor so much? ‘Cause he had problems.

My family are police officers, detectives. My brother Mitch is FBI. Mitch is like that – a stern enforcer.

I learned hard lessons in life; I had to because I had so much happen: My mother died my sophomore year in high school. The next year, same day, my brother dropped dead. Two years after that, I got married because my girlfriend got pregnant. The year after my wedding, my father – who I had only recently met – died.

I wasn’t disciplined at all. As good of an athlete as I was, I was not disciplined. Had I had the drive that I have in comedy, and acting, and writing, that’s why I knew it just wasn’t right for me.

I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn’t changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.

I’m funny. I’m a comedian. I’m not a clown.

Making people laugh is what I’ve been doing since I was like four or five years old. I still have a lust, I still have a passion. I don’t care about how I look, I’m dedicated to the laughs.

I want people to say at the end of my day, you know, like I used to say about Sidney Poitier and James Cagney and Joan Crawford and Red Skelton and those guys and Bill Cosby. They did quality and substance. You always remember them.

The one thing about comedy, making it become a part of you, the audience loves it, because you become part of them.

I don’t know who Little Richard is.

Thus human beings judge of one another, superficially, casually, throwing contempt on one another, with but little reason, and no charity.

I’m leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

You have to study a great deal to know a little.

We spend our lives dreaming of the future, not realizing that a little of it slips away every day.

I had no education in filmmaking. I started with a 8mm camera. I made 34 films, and little by little I gained more experience in filming.

The dread was built into the 2016 election – a little spoonful of dread.

I can’t believe that I changed so little. I expected to look old and hollow and gray, but I guess it’s only me on the inside that has shriveled and deteriorated.