It's not about the outside, it's the inside. But dressing on the outside can help the inside.
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field. . . Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.
I'm what they call a 'non-black person of color': NBPOC. It's easy and seductive and common to mobilize around these identity issues, but often that's done at the expense of considering structural anti-blackness. That puts everything in a slightly different light for me, especially because of where I am and why - where I am in the world of the arts, where I live, in Harlem - and the music that I've been able to make, whom I've been able to make it with, who has nurtured me. It's not just about solidarity. It's actually about debt.
I am obliged to renounce violence, and abstain from it altogether.
God deliver me from people who are so spiritual that they want to turn everything into perfect contemplation, come what may.
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.