I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences. He knew the course of the stars in the universe before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn't flat.

Mum was an absolutely determined woman. She was determined I would have a good education, and they went without all sorts of things to ensure it.

During my senior year, I was supposed to spend a semester student teaching, but decided I couldn't be a teacher. My aunt Beth's friend was Jackie Gleason's daughter, Linda Miller. She encouraged me to talk to her. After doing that, she recommended Catholic University's M.F.A. acting program. So that's what I did.

I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.