#Black

"I had a dream about you. Our relationship faded from red to white, and somewhere in the middle, in the pink zone, I told you I loved you and you returned it. However, at white, our relationship went black and I sought red in the arms of another woman."

"I would never know how good I was if I didn't have Bob Arum. Bob Arum is white, Jewish; He was working for prosecutor's office. I'm black, an ex-convict, ex-number runner. Who would be most likely to succeed? It would be Bob 100-1. Yet I beat Bob on everything we ever done, with love."

"Your life has to consist of more than 'Black people should unite.' You hope they do, but not twenty-four hours a day."

"It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor."

"I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion -- against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas."

"Think of what starlight And lamplight would lack Diamonds and fireflies If they couldn’t lean against Black. . . ."

"Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper."

"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."

"To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be."

"I see black light (his last words)"

"I grew up when one of America's greatest black playwrights, August Wilson, was writing about life in Pittsburgh, but I never saw myself in any of his straight-male plays. And then I see 'Angels,' which was so honest and painful, and it had this black drag queen in it, Belize, with a big heart. I finally had a character to relate to."

"I dug up some old John Buscema 'Conan' comics. Man, when Alfredo Alcala was inking, that was some of the most beautiful black and white comic art ever published. The stories are good, too, though early '70s comics based on Conan is a festival of sexist, racist stereotypes."

"People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed."

"I wasn't shy, but I was really hyper. Nobody got my sense of humor. I was a black skater kid."

"You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.'"

"Who I was was not acceptable to black L.A. youth: the way I spoke and my sense of humor. Everybody else had relaxers and pressed hair. I wore my hair in an Afro puff. Nappy. The way I dressed. It was all about name brands at the time in L.A. I had no idea. All those things, I failed miserably at."

"Nothing is black or white, nothing's 'us or them.' But then there are magical, beautiful things in the world. There's incredible acts of kindness and bravery, and in the most unlikely places, and it gives you hope."

"Testimony is an integral part of the Black religious tradition. It is the occasion where the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her."

"Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?"

"Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected."