It is such a luxury to open a new book that's highly recommended by friends - either an inspirational yet humorously self-deprecating memoir, or a page-turning piece of fiction.

Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.

This game wears on you. It tears you down. It's perpetual motion for some people who've achieved a level of independence, like Madonna and Jay-Z - they don't need to do music anymore. But there's people who need it. And in that need, that's when it's tough and it tears you to pieces.

The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.

All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.

I don't have a disregard for my reader in humor pieces.

While it is true that Frank had a great sense of humor, he was also very serious about composing music. In reality there are only a handful of skilled players who can play his most complex pieces. It takes a lot of patience to learn and requires a fantastic memory.

I love Sell Out, I think it's great. I love the jingles. The whole thing as an album is a wonderful piece of work. The cover. Everything about it. It's got humor, great songs, irony.

Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.

Writing humor for me is more like a watchful-ness. You have to watch. When you say something funny, or someone else does, it's more like you wait for the piece.

People are wired for lots of things. We're wired for novelty. We're wired for humor. We're wired for new pieces of information that surprise us in some way or add value to our lives. We're wired for fear.

We get to live in a time that we get to use social media as a tool. It's not just a face on a piece of paper, and that's what makes you someone's favorite model. We can have a very similar sense of humor as someone, and that's why we're their favorite model, or our personal style, off the runway, is why we're their favorite.

Everything I commission - whether it is for me or for a client's home or for a hotel or office - is absolutely unique to that job. I have everything made, or I find vintage and antique pieces at markets and auctions.

Any time you make a movie where you're living in a certain head space for an extended period of time, it's tough not to take a little piece home with you.

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

I've always loved great upholstery, and think that a great sofa is one of the most important pieces of furniture in your home.

We need to encourage black women to know that they are authors of their own destiny, that they have important stories to tell, and that they are capable, so magically capable, of writing them and creating important pieces of work that will live forever in history.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

I am intrigued by inanimate objects. They're a piece of history, someone's statement and ideas of life.

To me, meeting Buddy Guy was like meeting a piece of history.

My favourite finds are often antique pieces with a history.

After my diagnosis at age 22 with leukemia, the second piece of news I learned was that I would likely be infertile as a result of chemotherapy. It was a one-two punch that was my first indication that issues of cancer and sexual health are inextricably tied.

In order to lead a country or a company, you've got to get everybody on the same page and you've got to be able to have a vision of where you're going. America can't have a vision of health care for everybody, green economy, regulations - can't have a bunch of piece-meal activities. It's got to have a vision.

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.