Spirit of adventure and kindness.

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

Queremos crear un ambiente familiar en donde no todo sea fácil, en donde no todo les caiga del cielo, sino que puedan construir su propio camino y tengan ese sentido de desesperación y esa hambre. Eso significa también que todo ese dinero no se les va a dejar a ellos. Se les dará muchísimo amor, como les damos, y muchas oportunidades de educación y de desarrollo, pero todo ese dinero no es para ellos.

A healthy planet.

So I’m listening, I’m watching, and I’m also reading while I’m making.

I’m calling people like Simone Leigh, Cauleen Smith—people who have sold things—asking, “What does this look like? What is this process?”

One of my biggest disappointments: I used to take piano lessons as a young girl, and then I stopped, because I was having a really difficult year as a kid. My step father had died, and I didn't want to do anything -- so I just stopped taking lessons. And then I think back and I'm like, “Damn, I could have been Nina Simone!” Haha

I work on other things. There's usually more than one project brewing. I also write. I also listen to talks; I love listening to black feminist thinkers or listening to people read their poetry. What I try to do is fill my arsenal. I'll put this shit down or I'll pick something else up. Like some days, I just take whole days where I "play," and that's where I'll only do production stuff.

You can become a different person. That’s actually my favorite thing about Malcolm X is that he transformed himself multiple times over. He became a different person and always for the better. He kept leveling up.

So I don’t ever feel the urge to kind of rewrite the work.