"The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?"

"We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community."

"You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa."

"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice."

"We are going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work."

"The fact that women are paid 73 cents on the dollar for work equivalent to work being done by men is unacceptable in America."

"Voyeurism is a director's job description. It's an artist's, too."

"I'm the fourth generation to be in show business. It's pretty neat it's nice to have that family history."