I have my favourite black knife with me all the time. It's a switchblade. It relaxes me to flick it.

I'm not walking around feeling black all the time. That would stress me out. It would make me crack.

I grew up figure skating, and in figure skating there is only a handful of black people at the time figure skating with me.

A lot of times when people cast me, they want this big, deep black voice... And I tend to recycle them with different roles from time to time.

Guys just don't care. We don't take the time to plan behind each other's back. We just say, If you don't like me, screw you'. If a guy doesn't like you, you know because you have a black eye.

I didn't like my hair and makeup one time on a photo shoot, and my publicist told me, 'You should just be happy with it - they haven't had a black girl on the cover since forever.' She's no longer my publicist.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

The 'Room 93' EP was just kind of picking apart the sense of voyeurism and the sense of isolation and turning it into, essentially, a little black book and reflecting on - at that time - 19 years of me forming relationships with people.

I've designed since I was 12. The first was when I skated to Carmen, in red and gold and black. I wanted so many frills at that time. It had a lot going on for a little person like me. And I picked out fabrics that didn't stretch. Very uncomfortable.

'The New Black Yoga' originally was born from a film that I had made prior called 'Black Yoga.' And I was living in Berlin at the time, dealing with a lot of anxiety and stress around the project that I was working on, which is not an abnormal thing for me.

I think that the first book that made me think that I could try to be a writer - or that made me aware that a young black woman from the South could write about the South - was Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple,' which I read for the first time when I was in junior high.

At Marshall Field in Chicago, I had them take a big bed into the menswear department, one with black sheets. I'd get in bed wearing a nightcap, and my fans would get in bed with me, one at a time, and I'd sign their memorabilia. And then I'd give them a free pint of Ben & Jerry's.

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