Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.
I spent so many years in terror of 'making it legal' because the expression rang all too true - the wedding ritual struck me as nothing but a flowery front for the fulfilment of countless, tedious contracts and obligations.
Makeup is an art form for me. It's a form of expression, and it's such a cool way to get my creative juices flowing.
In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers.
Raymond Floyd. The man knows how to control situations. He was experienced. He didn't let me get overly excited; he kept me in check. It allowed me to free myself up, and I played really well with him.
I thought after that fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao, if this was supposed to be fight of the decade, then people must be missing me a lot more.
I laugh when Floyd Mayweather says that if he went back in time he would beat us all. I'll tell you this: if he was in the same era as Hagler and Hearns and Leonard and me, I don't think he would be such a big name. There is too much talk.
V-necks are great because you can get a little fat and you still look kind of good - and I like to get fat sometimes, so it's nice. I like to fluctuate between the world of skinny and fat, so V-necks suit me well.
Until the age of five, my parents spoke to me in Chinese or a combination of Chinese and English, but they didn't force me to speak Mandarin. In retrospect, this was sad, because they believed that my chance of doing well in America hinged on my fluency in English. Later, as an adult, I wanted to learn Chinese.
Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.
It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 years ago, I went to Rome for the first time and felt an instant gut connection and wanted to get to know the city.
I unfortunately don't speak French, but my wife is now fluent in English, which really reflects rather badly on me.
I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.
I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
When Nigeria actually gave me the call-up I thought 'oh, it's going to be a challenge, I don't go back there a lot, I don't really speak the language.' I wasn't speaking the language as fluently as I am now, so it was always going to be a challenge, but it was a challenge I decided to take and change nationalities.
It became very obvious to me that in the United States of America, a fluffy ethnic disabled chick was never going to get a job unless she did stand-up.
I can't say I'm not guilty of age discrimination when it comes to animals. Like most people I've walked into a shelter more than a few times and a magnetic force has pulled me toward those fluffy little puppies in the corner cage.
I have a teenage daughter and a 10-year-old daughter. Things are pink and fluffy at my house, with two little dogs. It's pretty funny to be me now. And I'm in on the joke that is my life.
For me, pop culture is very fluid: it's music, it's movies, it's books, it's art, it's tech, it's so many things - and as marketing and brand advocates, we should be able to to take products and services and match them to what's happening in pop culture.
