I grew up in a neighborhood in Baltimore that was like a war zone, so I never learned to trust that there were people who could help me.
When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad.
For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.
I wanted to inspire people not to work under a bamboo ceiling. Whatever you are - yellow, black, white, brown - you don't have to allow your skin to define who you are or how you operate your business. There's not one face to anything.
People are terrified of them to the point where Trump wants to ban all Muslims from coming here, which is ridiculous.
In Cleveland there is legislation moving forward to ban people from wearing pants that fit too low. However, there is lots of opposition from the plumber' union.
I support workplace clean air. But a federal ban on smoking would mean that you couldn't smoke in your own home. I don't care what people do in their home.
It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.
People wrestle sometimes making movies, and I think that conflict is a very essential thing. I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies.
People worry about Twitter. Twitter is banal. It's 140-character messages. By definition, you can hardly say anything profound. On the other hand, we communicate. And, sometimes, we communicate about things that are important.
Pop music might seem banal and simple to some people, but it's what it expresses that counts.
The lesson of travel seems to be so banal, but so great, which is that people are just so amazingly decent the world over. Given the disparity of income and wealth, it's amazing not just that you don't get robbed everywhere - it's amazing you don't get eaten.
Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal. Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That's where the real danger lies.
Evil has always been there; it's always a part of us. Evil is no big surprise. But what about the people who gave freely, who stood up for human dignity? Even in the most extreme and terrible situations, these acts of dignity existed. And for me, that is the banality of good.
People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.
Bananas are great, as I believe them to be the only known cure for existential dread. Also, Mother Teresa said that in India, a woman dying in the street will share her banana with anyone who needs it, whereas in America, people amass and hoard as many bananas as they can to sell for an exorbitant profit. So half of them go bad, anyway.
You have to give people permission to laugh. That's why they would always cut to the banana peel in the Laurel and Hardy movies.
When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.
I work from home a lot. I think I get as much work done at the office as at home, and I'm used to working with people who don't work in the office. I don't really care where they are, even if they're on a banana leaf somewhere. If they deliver their work, I am completely fine. I don't need someone sitting at their desk to produce.
