Everybody - every single person - has a story. Find yours and tell it in your voice.
Kenya Barris
Jill Soloway is a friend of mine. She does 'Transparent,' and she's amazingly funny and brilliant and bright. And I love her show.
I will be so happy when 'diversity' is not a word.
Sometimes you realize that life isn't defined by the good times.
Black, white, rich, poor - we galvanize through the hard times. We really see it happen in relationships. In the best and worst of those moments, you come together, and you look for your tribe.
I tried to do Kwanzaa with my family and was like, 'This sucks. What am I doing this for?' For me, I felt like I was doing it because I was trying to live up to someone else's idea of what 'black' was.
I set out to tell my story, which is based on my family. Dr. Cosby told his story in 'The Cosby Show.' The comparisons stop there in terms of my creation of the show. We just both happen to have black fathers at the center of it.
The small moments I've had to talk with President Obama, I've told him, 'I get it.' His presidency was in some ways almost overshadowed by the fact that he was the first black president.
I think that's the key to any artistic endeavor: You want it to feel fresh and not have people look at it like it's re-creation of something else unless it's done in a really strong way.
I really want to do what 'Veep' did. 'Veep,' in a very comical way, gave us a look inside the political machine, but I want to do it for the average American family.
I consider myself a disciple of Norman Lear. And one of the things he did was topic-driven humor.
What I did not want to be was a fad, because fads die. I had one of the George Michael Wham! neon-colored sweatshirts, and I thought it would never go out of style. Fads die.
I love Meryl Streep.
I know a lot for me, personally, the best moments have come from watching my kids have an experience I never thought about as a kid but then remembered as a parent.
We're supposed to be becoming more evolved as a society, and we're actually becoming less evolved.
I am what I am as a writer because of Norman Lear and Spike Lee. Norman Lear in particular.
At 24, I was probably making more than 95 percent of my friends. I was burning through money.
I'm not for having to support everything that's black, because I definitely don't. But I do feel like it is imperative for us to see that we are not a monolithic people.
My mom went through civil rights; my dad went through civil rights. My name was Kenya because they wanted to give me an African name.
You get a little older, and you start understanding the world in a different way and what you don't have control over and what you do have control over.
My wife is a doctor, and we had a decent life financially. My kids were going to nice schools and had nannies. We weren't rich, but we were better off than I was growing up. And I looked around, and I was like, 'Who are these people?' It was the opposite of what I remembered growing up.
When you reach a level of status - and making it to college is an accomplishment in itself - you are trying to define who you are.
Actors are magical people. They can take words you wrote and say them in a way that, although you thought the line was good when you wrote it, it's fantastic when it comes out of their mouth.
'A Different World,' for me, was in a lot of ways responsible for me going to college. I wanted to go to a black college, and I wanted to get out of Los Angeles. It's just a natural part of all of our journeys, that idea of leaving home.
I hear people say, 'I'm not a role model' all the time, and it's like, 'Well, of course you're not!' It doesn't mean that people aren't going to look at you as one, though.
No civil rights movement has gotten anywhere without the help of white liberals.
The PC way of handling culture has been to not talk about it. But we should be talking about it.
I'm doing another pilot about a black Democratic pundit who's married to a white Republican pundit. And the purpose of me wanting to do that show - and ABC sort of supported me in the way they did - is because I feel like, you know, the political system is like an old married couple.
No one's pro-police brutality.
I hear a creak in my house, and I'm calling the police immediately, but at the same time, I do know that when I call them, I'm going to make sure to say, 'I'm a black guy, and this is my house.'
As much as we want to say racism is dead, it's still rearing its ugly head constantly.
I don't necessarily believe that 'The Cosby Show' should disappear as a cultural reference, but it is. That's sad to me. I understand why. He was a man who possibly did some really bad things, and he should be punished beyond a doubt. But that show, and the impact it had not just on black culture, but culture, was amazing.
'Black-ish' is a show that has spoken to all different types of people and brought them closer as a community, and I'm so proud of the series.
I want to start really developing more on the film side.
Writers' rooms are terrifying. You take someone whose never done this before, and this is their life's dream that is about to happen or not about to happen - that is an amazing amount of pressure to have.
I've been on predominantly 'white' shows before, and I had also been on predominantly 'black' shows. I would complain that when I was on a white show, they would only hire me because there was a black character or they needed a black voice. But then I would be mad if they went and hired a white dude in my position.
You can have good times with anyone, but it's really different and much more interesting when you look at how you get through the bad times with someone.
I don't know Channing Dungey well, but we have talked several times, and she seems like an amazing executive.
After the first couple of years of on 'Black-ish,' my wife and I actually broke up. We got back together, and it was this really, really difficult time for me.
When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.
My father lost a lung in a chemical accident at General Motors, and after a while, he got a settlement that sort of changed all of our lives and moved us from, what we say, 'ashy to classy' in some aspects.
My kids are nothing like I remember black kids being when I was a kid.
I want to make sure I don't leave any money for my kids, so I'm going to spend it all on clothes.
The thing that I get so often with network comedies - and, I think, some of the most brilliant people in the world do them - but it's easy to hide behind a joke. I kind of feel like when you have to face things, and you don't have humor, it becomes very vulnerable; it exposes your deepest and darkest fears in some aspects.
The acknowledgement and celebration of Juneteenth as an American and possibly international holiday is something that I would put in the life goals column for me.
At my core, I'm shy.
Honestly, I regret not having spanked my kids.
I still believe a little bit that changing gender roles have hurt relationships.
My kids did not know that Obama was the first black president. I felt like I needed to tell them because I felt like, 'How could you not know that?' But for the ones who didn't know, he was basically the only president they knew.
I wanted to do a show about a family that is absolutely black. Because as Du Bois has shown, we do have to live a double consciousness every day in the world. We have to walk our path and walk the mainstream path, and there's never really been a show that's talked about what that's like.
