I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.
In tragedy, it's hard to find a good resolution; it's not black and white: it's a big fog of gray.
There is a distinct layer between the Earth and the universe, which is extremely black. Slowly, the entire universe starts to look 3D, like you can fly through it rather than this sphere of blackness overhead. And when you're above the atmosphere, there isn't water vapour in the air to make things foggy.
The simplest fix for better grilling is to line the inside of your barbecue with tin foil. It dramatically affects how evenly the heat is distributed. That crusty black hibachi or Weber grill is doing your food no favors.
Black folk who don't realize I'm mixed will treat me like I'm some racist person, or when white people find out I'm black, they treat me with racism, and I don't feel like I belong or fit in anywhere.
I've been getting interested in reimagining folk songs and writing songs that should have existed but didn't, particularly around the Civil War when black voices were muted and only allowed particular channels.
I have not seen 'The Lion King.' I don't do black folklore. And I'm black.
I gave it up three weeks before my black belt, foolishly. I got to my third brown belt and must have trained for 18 months but never went for it. I was nearly 18 and got this thing in my head about, ' Who are they to grade me?' Trying to be a rebel when I should have done it. It's my only regret, not going for a black belt.
Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there's always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with colour photography. Everything looks more exciting.
Bears are extremely human, even down to their footprints. But I am also a fly fisherman, so I have fished beside brown bears in Alaska and was once charged by a black bear. I love bears.
The whole world feels that it knows Francis, not so much because he follows Francis of Assisi but because he is always himself. We have seen him pay his own hotel bill and heard that Francis called Buenos Aires for a pair of ordinary black shoes, like John XXIII, who preferred stout peasant shoes to the traditional papal footwear.
I remember one of them - it was a 1941 black Ford. As it went by very slow, a guy leaned out with a shotgun, keeping a bead on us all the time, and we just had to walk slowly and wait for him to kill us... They didn't kill us, but they didn't end it, either.
Imagine if Lin-Manuel Miranda had tried to do 'Hamilton' first in Hollywood. They would have told him, 'The forefathers weren't Latino or black. They didn't speak in hip hop.' That would never had gotten going in Hollywood ever. But theater let Lin-Manuel him do it, and he created an incredible masterpiece.
I'm a black woman, so I'm obviously not going to write something where women aren't at the forefront.
The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.
For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie - forging an identity, 'making' one, but 'lying' about one, too.
Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical.
The 'Room 93' EP was just kind of picking apart the sense of voyeurism and the sense of isolation and turning it into, essentially, a little black book and reflecting on - at that time - 19 years of me forming relationships with people.
I spent summers in my room listening to cast albums, like 'Les Miserables,' every night. I knew it backwards and forwards. I want to be the first black Jean Valjean.
If Obama's enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country's first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop's foundational generation.
