I don't stand for the black man's side I don' t stand for the white man's side. I stand for God's side.

What's interesting about books that take place in the future even twenty years in the future is that many of them are black or white: It's either a utopia or it's misery. The real truth is that there's going to be both things in any future just like there is now.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world wipe out every trace of him dispossess him of his shadow drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

To me the black black woman is our essential mother the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair almost entirely of our future as a people.

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

Funny is not a color. Being black is only good from the time you get from the curtain to the microphone.

You know what? I never really factor Hollywood into anything. I'm a black actor so I can't really control what Hollywood thinks. I gotta go do my thing and my jokes have got to be funny. Whatever I do has got to be great.

I'm half Jewish I'm half black I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It's like What is he doing?

I wear black skinny-fit jeans - I can't get away from them. It's funny because I wore baggy jeans for ages then one day my friend convinced me to try on a skinny pair and I thought they were great.

Do you know it's funny but I never thought of being blind as a disadvantage and I never thought of being black as a disadvantage.

Friendship is mutual blackmail elevated to the level of love.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

I am a Republican a black dyed in the wool Republican and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.

I think things like food the food of the south is sort of the common tie that binds us all Black and White the sense memories. It's a very particular part of the country.

When I hosted the dinner I served fast food hamburgers. It had nothing to do with black white purple yellow green race. it had nothing to do with Tiger or his family or his golf game.

My husband cooks fancier food for himself than I've ever cooked on-air. I call him from the road and he's making champagne-vanilla salmon or black-cherry pork chop. Half of me is feeling unworthy. Not only am I not a chef I'm not a better cook than my own husband!

Well first of all we've got to get away from being offended by the truth. We've seen a 41 percent increase in food stamp recipients across the United States of America since President Obama was sworn in in January 2009. That has nothing to do with black white Hispanic or whatever. It's a fact and we need to you know deal with that.

We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us food was part of the fabric of our day.

The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big black shadow.

We Hoosiers hold to some quaint notions. Some might say we 'cling' to them though not out of fear or ignorance. We believe in paying our bills. We have kept our state in the black throughout the recent unpleasantness while cutting rather than raising taxes by practicing an old tribal ritual - we spend less money than we take in.

Honest to God all my life I have had such a fear of spiders. In fact I use to have a reoccurring dream about one. Very clearly it was black with a red head. It would sit up in the corner of the bedroom and when it started getting closer I would wake up in a panic.

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context brilliant African father he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness a deracination.