Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Kenya Barris

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.

My kids are nothing like I remember black kids being when I was a kid.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

At my core, I'm shy.

I am what I am as a writer because of Norman Lear and Spike Lee. Norman Lear in particular.

Everybody - every single person - has a story. Find yours and tell it in your voice.

I still believe a little bit that changing gender roles have hurt relationships.

I believe comedy is a really good lens to filter serious issues through. If people are laughing, they don't necessarily realize until they stop laughing that they just took something in that's going to start a conversation.

Most importantly, I want my kids to be happy. You're only as happy as your saddest kid.

I feel like money is an interesting thing when you don't come from it.

For me, Shonda Rhimes is an amazing person that I look up to. She empowered a lot of her writers to go on and do other things while, at the same time, she made sure she kept her stamp on those things and grew her business.

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 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.

To me, the Peabody was as big if not bigger than any award, but I do understand an Emmy Award-winning show has a different buzz when it comes to start talking about renewals and things like that. There's a professional something to it that matters.

For me, it was important to keep my name in 'mainstream Hollywood.'

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.

When you're in the middle of it, when you're a kid growing up, you don't think, 'This is my first heartbreak.' You just think, 'My heart is broken.' But then as a parent, you look back, and you see your child go through his or her first heartbreak, and you're realizing, 'Oh my God, this is her first heartbreak.'

At 24, I was probably making more than 95 percent of my friends. I was burning through money.

And I feel like, as a black man within black culture, I know very well firsthand - as do my parents and my grandparents and great-grandparents - we're used to things not going our way.

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.'

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.

There has never been a prosecuted case of slavery. There's no criminality to it. So, it was just like, 'It's over,' and thus, because it was over, and it was never considered 'wrong' in the prosecutable, criminal sense of the word, the country doesn't take it as wrong.

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.

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.

As a creative, you have to be your truest form. You can't worry about fitting into whatever boxes people want to put you in.

As wild and raunchy as Richard Pryor was, people related to his honesty because they found something in their life that they understood.

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.

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.

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.

It's hard to take a stand. You're not going to make everybody happy.

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.

I want to make sure I don't leave any money for my kids, so I'm going to spend it all on clothes.

I love Donald Glover.

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.

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.

I love Meryl Streep.

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.

I have a 'hope for the best, expect the worst' mentality.

I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.

I'm a huge fan of writing for people rather than writing and then trying to wedge people in. I'd love to know who the people are before I can write for them. For me, it's a much more organic way to create characters.

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.

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.

For me, one of the big things I really worried about a lot was nuclear war growing up.

'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.

The PC way of handling culture has been to not talk about it. But we should be talking about it.

No civil rights movement has gotten anywhere without the help of white liberals.

I wanted to be a doctor, because I grew up on 'Cosby.'

No one's pro-police brutality.

'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.

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.

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.

Honestly, I regret not having spanked my kids.

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.

If Adam Sandler does a bad movie, he doesn't bring down the whole white race. But if Tyler Perry does, it's like, 'See what you guys do?' and that type of thing.

Sometimes you realize that life isn't defined by the good times.

There's never really been a true apology for slavery.

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.

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.

I've found that the more honest and true you are and can talk about a character and people's experiences, it's less ostracizing. It actually has the opposite effect than one would think. It makes the characters and the story more inclusive.