When I was growing up, I installed refrigerators in supermarkets. My father was an electrical engineer.

I don't know what my calling is, but I want to be here for a bigger reason. I strive to be like the greatest people who have ever lived.

I know how to learn anything I want to learn. I absolutely know that I could learn how to fly the space shuttle because someone else knows how to fly it, and they put it in a book. Give me the book, and I do not need somebody to stand up in front of the class.

I love being black in America, and especially being black in Hollywood.

Literary men now routinely tell their readers about their divorces. One literary man who reviews books wrote, in reviewing a study of Ruskin, that he had never read a book by Ruskin but that the study confirmed him in his belief that he didn't want to read a book by Ruskin. This man very often writes about his family life.

Being from Oakland, you see a lot of thing. You see friends turn on friends all the time. You see family turn on family.

Find something bigger than yourself and pour every ounce of who you are into it. If that's your family, be the best father on Earth. If you are a cop, firefighter, or a trash man, be the best.

I was writing from a very, very early age. My father used to write. He died early, and my mother was a schoolteacher, so my academic background from childhood is a strong one, a good one.