I sought my father in the world of the black musician, because it contained wisdom, experience, sadness and loneliness. I was not ever interested in the music of boys. From my youngest years, I was interested in the music of men.

The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.

It was the Michael Jordan/Nike phenomenon that really let people see that athletes were OK, and black athletes were OK. Defying a previous wisdom - not only that black athletes wouldn't sell in white America, but that the NBA as a predominantly black sport could not sell in white America.

There was a period of 10 years where the conventional wisdom was Black shows don't sell overseas, therefore nobody is interested.

When I got married, I hired a great choir - the St. James Choir, an all-black gospel choir - to sing at my wedding.

I love a black wedding dress.

The day of the wedding went like these things generally do, full of anxious moments interspersed with black comedy.

I don't really have a treasured possession, but I do love my family's proper old photo album. We all have hundreds of photos on our phones now, but you can't beat the old albums stuffed with black-and-white wedding photographs and 1970s Polaroids.

Non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia can only celebrate Valentine's Day behind closed doors. Apparently, this has led to a huge black market for flowers and wrapping paper.

It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.

When the people who are responsible for our country ask you a direct question, I expect them to accept a direct answer, not to be blackballed because you are telling the truth.

I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

Although humans see reality in colour, for me, black and white has always been connected to the image's deeper truth, to its most hidden meaning.

The Minutemen were seen as more of an art thing than Black Flag, although I didn't see them that way. It confused people when we put out Saccharine Trust, too.

I'm thankful to be a mixed racial person in skateboarding. I'm part Japanese too, so when I go over to Japan everyone loves me there, when I go somewhere where there are a lot of Black people they'll love me there too.

I'm thankful that l I have an amazing family, black women that raised me.

I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it's like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

I support any procedure that allows photographers to express themselves, whether that involves color, black and white, platinum, palladium and digital technology.

I use technology for communication, but I don't have a Blackberry or an iPhone. I use an outdated cell phone, but I'm fine with it.

I like technology, but 'Black Mirror' is more what the consequences are, and it doesn't tend to be about technology itself: it tends to be how we use or misuse it. We've not really thought through the consequences of it.

I was all-state in four sports in New Jersey, but sometimes I couldn't get served at a restaurant two blocks from my high school. There were no job opportunities then... the only thing a black youth could aspire to be was a bellboy or a pullman or an elevator operator, or, maybe, a teacher. There was a time when all we had was black baseball.

I remember being in a history lesson and saying to my teacher, 'How come you never talk about black scientists and inventors and pioneers?' And she looked at me and said, 'Because there aren't any.'