“I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.”

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”

“Black Mary: Leroy. And John. And Cujoe. And Sam. And Robert. One after the other they come and they go. You can't hold on to none of them. They slip right through your hands. They use you up and yo...”

“Aunt Esther: You think you supposed to know everything. Life is a mystery. Don't you know life is a mystery? I see you still trying to figure it out. It ain't all for you to know. It's all an adven...”

“Sometimes you find bad luck and good luck in the same place.”

“Some people carry their luck with them and people got to find it.”

“The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you cant, youre dead”

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebooka fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

“Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. Its the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.”