All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It’s so ancient.
If all the world’s a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
If all the students who slept through lectures were laid end to end, they’d all be a lot more comfortable. If all the world’s a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
I’m not very pious about anything, fortunately, but I’m skewering myself first. I’m skewering things that I care about and things that are important to me and then just my own foibles.
If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That’s Always Passed Out on the Couch.
I don’t know exactly what a black Chinese restaurant would be, but I would sure love to see one.
There’s this line between propriety and how we really speak and how we really think. And I’m just trying to have fun with that stuff.
I don’t try to be satirical. I just try to get what’s in my head on the page. And that part is hard for me to do. It takes a long, long time to make it poetic, somewhat essayistic.
I think everybody focuses on race, but it’s about a ton of things, and I just see these things as all interrelated and all interwoven in a weird way.
I can’t say that I love writing, but I do love the satisfaction that it gives me.
Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.
It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?” “It is.” “Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.
If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you’d either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.
My father had a theory that poor people are the best drivers because they can’t afford to carry car insurance and have to drive like they live, defensively.
Foy was no Tree of Knowledge, at most he was a Bush of Opinion.
If he was indeed an “autodidact,” there’s no doubt he had the world’s shittiest teacher.
The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.
I understand now that the only time black people don’t feel guilty is when we’ve actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.
The wretched of the Earth, he calls us. People too poor to afford cable and too stupid to know that they aren’t missing anything.
Like Nazis at a Ku Klux Klan rally, they were comfortable ideologically, but not in terms of corporate culture.