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As white people, we are used to representations of ourselves crowding the covers of magazines, crowning the posters of newly released films. The good guys are white, we have learned, after eons of our faces being plastered under cowboy hats and in impeccable Bond suits. White men are Superman, we have learned. White men are Ethan Hunt and Neo and white men are hobbits. Bad men, we have learned, are black. They’re gang bangers and thugs and talk loud and sometimes deliver funny lines where we laugh at their Otherness. Black men aren’t heroes, we learn. Our imagination and subconscious are so saturated with white supremacist notions of goodness, beauty, and heroism, that when confronted head-on with an image of a black man who is brilliant and kind and normal and who saves the day, we transform into robotic versions of ourselves: Does… not… compute. Hero… must be… white. It’s this line of thinking that turned Disney’s Princess Tiana into an animal for 95 percent of the movie. The collective white imagination had difficulty imagining a black girl as a princess… and so she became a frog.

Make your passion your profession, and work will become a game.

“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.”

Ignorant people are more likely to believe they are brilliant, while intelligent people are more likely to underestimate themselves.

It takes a minute to have a crush on someone an hour to like someone and a day to love someone but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.

A dream without a plan is just a wish.