I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent at least since the early nineteenth century when 3 000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

The large ensemble cast and the fact that it was being shot in New York combined with a lot of strong positive images as far as African Americans are concerned really turned me on to The Best Man.

It would be good for us Africans to accept ourselves as we are and recapture some of the positive aspects of our culture.

I've always gotten a positive reaction to doing African-American characters.

African art is functional it serves a purpose. It's not a dormant. It's not a means to collect the largest cheering section. It should be healing a source a joy. Spreading positive vibrations.

I guess probably in my time in politics it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community despite being subscription television's most valuable customers they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options.

African-Americans who might have disagreed with candidate Obama's left-of-center politics voted for him in 2008 because electing a candidate with brown skin was too historic an opportunity to miss.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals but even as I withdrew into this reading I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

I have a pet lizard named Puff five goldfish - named Pinky Brain Jowels Pearl and Sandy an oscar fish named Chef two pacus an albino African frog named Whitey a bonsai tree four Venus flytraps a fruit fly farm and sea monkeys.