To stay sane, I lived in my head, where I could travel and imagine. In my mind, I played a championship game with the Knicks. I won Wimbledon five times. If the Yankees needed a home run, I came to bat.

When the very people that you been taught to believe in - the police, the D.A., these are the people that are supposed to stand for justice - and when you know that they lied to you, it's hard for you to have trust in anybody.

America should be ashamed to say they have the best justice system in the world when, every day, race plays a part in who goes to prison, who don't go to prison.

To me, America need to clean up their own home before they tell another country about human rights. I'm a primary example. America don't care nothing about human rights.

Death is a fearful thing.

I think having a strong female figure in my mom as an in-house role model was huge and really motivated me to continue to pursue my passion and my dreams.

My mother taught me about the power of inspiration and courage, and she did it with a strength and a passion that I wish could be bottled.

My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.