We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O'Neal Richard Roundtree Jim Brown Pam Grier. For the first time I saw 'The Negro' get one over on 'The Man.'

I was a brownie for a day. My mom made me stop. She didn't want me to conform.

My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black white brown red yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

You know the sad thing of post-9/11 which was of course horrific was that the city in which I felt completely at home for two decades suddenly people like us - brown people - were looked at as the 'Others.'

I'm really interested in modern history but to fulfill a History degree at Brown you have to do modern and pre-modern.

I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang Tod Browning and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre.

Hash browns are my favorite breakfast food.

I love Alton Brown's show 'Good Eats ' about the chemistry of food. It's really thoughtful.

I fear that the rising personal bankruptcies and repossessions are the first signs of bigger problems to come and personal debt - Gordon Brown's legacy to millions of Britain's families - will hang like a millstone around the neck of the British people for years to come.