“I remember going into a bookshop, and the only book I saw with a black...” — Malorie Blackman Quote

“I remember going into a bookshop, and the only book I saw with a black child on the cover was 'A Thief in the Village' by James Berry, and I thought, 'Is this still the state of publishing?' Then I thought, 'Either I can whine about it or try to do something about it.'”

“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.'”

“Shakespeare's 'Othello' was inspired by Cinthio's 'A Moorish Captain'; his 'Hamlet' came from Saxo Grammaticus's 'Amleth.'”

“Go back to the very beginning, when we first started playing in local pubs. We used to play Chuck Berry covers. Every now and then, we'd slip in one of our own songs, and we found that we were getting away with it - nobody seemed to know these were original tracks.”

“You have tours that go to certain parts of the world to see a specific type of bird, and then you come back to Hollywood, and you see tour vans that go around in hopes of catching a glimpse of Halle Berry going out to get a newspaper.”

“I really only knew the name Berry Gordy growing up, but I didn't know what he looked like or anything about him.”