"When I was 10, I was in my own world. Getting a digital radio in my room was a really big thing for me. This tiny little speaker. It was really liberating, like there was something happening in my room at all times. I was obsessed with radio and knew everything that was going on. I’d listen to the Top 40 countdown every week, and there was this band Queen that kept coming up. I loved “Another One Bites the Dust.” A friend of mine told me that song was about war and killing people, and, again there was something about the evil and the fear of it that appealed to me. I remember the DJ saying, “This is No. 1 on the black charts.” So I thought Queen was black. Years later, I saw their record cover—and realized they weren’t black"

"Another one of my favorite movies in the whole world is A Soldier’s Story. It was originally a play but this one stars Denzel Washington and David Allen Grier and Howard E. Rollins. [It’s set] in World War II, it’s about the racial divide in the army, but it’s also about a murder mystery, but then it also dealt with the social class differences, and so that was another one that — [Norman] Jewison directed that; he really hit the nail on the head. Very well written, very well acted, another movie I could quote from top to bottom."