I'm in a real minority as far as having really supportive parents in regards to the arts. They never batted an eye as far as not letting me do that stuff. That's invaluable. I can't believe how unabashedly supportive they were about everything, between music and acting.
I never walk into the studio and say, I'm going to write a song called... 'X' or called 'Slow Me Down.' I write a ton of lyrics, often the title is somewhere in those 10 pages of... I call it brain vomit. It's kind of like whatever comes out of my head and I'm unabashedly just writing it down.
A lot of my chosen family is black and I say that unabashedly. For anyone who doesn't understand that, they just don't understand me and my generation because especially in the LGBT community, the concept of chosen family is so important and it's a survival tactic.
There is nothing in the whole frame of man which seems to me so unaccountable as that thing called conscience.
I think because I'm so naturally happy and unaffected and open, people thought I didn't take the jumping seriously. You're up that high, believe me - you take it very seriously.
I have a wonderful family: My parents are churchgoing, salt-of-the-earth Southern people. They gave me a lot of love and are so unaffected by fame.
My children are unaffected by me being an actress because that's the way I like to keep it. I love the fact that they are so innocent about my star status. Sometimes, they come running to me and say, 'Mom, you are on TV.'
I was so young when my dad died that I didn't think it had affected me. I had such tiny memories of him, just little glimpses, I thought I had been unaffected. But then I realised, somewhere in my late 40s I think, that probably the defining thing in my whole life was losing my dad.
Living in Cuba made me unafraid of whatever could happen to me.
If you can tell me what gun, type of gun, I can possess, then I didn't really get that right to keep and bear arms from God. It was not bequeathed to me; it was not unalienable, right?
I must admit, my old tribe is not unanimous on the view I've taken, but there are other folks like me, other former directors of the NSA who have said building in backdoors universally in Apple or other devices actually is bad for America. I think we can all agree it's bad for American privacy.
To me, the remarkable thing is it's pretty much unanimous the way blind people have been perceived in all cultures and for millennia. The first is, if they can't see, they must be stupid. The second one is, and this is a very old one, that blindness is such a terrible thing that it must be a curse from God for some evil that you committed.
Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.
I am very grateful to the MLAs for unanimously electing me as the BJD legislature party leader.
There are many people who probably don't agree with my acting, and it should be that way: they don't have to agree with me in general. I'm not here to be loved by everybody. I want to be. But I don't think it's humanly possible to be unanimously loved. But I think I've voiced it clearly that I'm not here to be a baby doll.
Communities of color have also had to watch video after video of unarmed black men and women being handled without regard for their lives or well-being. As a black man, I see these images, and I see myself; I wonder whether this will happen to me or one of my loved ones.
People say I'm deceptively unassuming, but that's the way I go through life. I'm not flash. You can make it sound calculated, but it's pretty much just me.
I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.
I grew up feeling unattractive, and it took a long time to grow into a place where I was comfortable with me.
They want to portray me as crazy, unhinged, unbalanced. OK, good, fine.
