I love dressing up. I'm from a huge African family and grew up in a really colorful place. The way I dress reflects my environment and wanting to take people into a fantasy world for half an hour.
I've always felt like a lot of people's misconceptions of me have to do with how I grew up. I grew up poor, and I grew up rich.
When I paint, I seriously consider the public presence of a person - the surface facade. I am less concerned with how people look when they wake up or how they act at home. A person's public presence reflects his own efforts at image development.
Seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. What you see reflects your thinking. And your thinking but reflects your choice of what you want to see. If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
You'll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I've written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has in a sense shaped me.
I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.
You know, I don't really understand a suburban environment. I want to be out in the woods, I want to be where it's wild, I want to wake up and hear birds, I want to walk outside and see a gaggle of turkeys bouncing across my lawn - I want to be someplace like that - or I want to be right in the middle of an urban environment.
I know how to read people. When you grow up in a rough environment, you have to have a sixth sense.
I mean, I've always felt like a lot of people's misconceptions of me have to do with how I grew up. I grew up poor, and I grew up rich. I think some people who have never met me have a misconception that when I was living with my father when he was successful, that I was somehow adversely affected by his success or the money he had and was making at the time.
What true 'Strong Style' really is, is the battle of the heart of man. It's not about how strong and how forceful you're throwing your blows. It's showing the never-say-die attitude of the human spirit. As long as it looks like you're fighting and giving your all, people will believe.
Our attitude is the environment we carry with us during the day. It proclaims to the world what we think of ourselves and indicates the sort of person we have made up our minds to be. It is the person we will become. How's your attitude today?
I grew up when people were afraid to 'come out' as gay. If you asked me how many gay kids I grew up with or went to school with, I would have said none - which of course could not have been true. The truth is I have no idea how many confused and frightened kids I grew up with. They are still out there.
I grew up on the south side of Chicago in a working class community. There were no miracles in my life, there's nothing miraculous about how I grew up, and I want people to know when they look at me, to be clear that they see what an investment in public education can look like.
I am convinced that attitude is the key to success or failure in almost any of life's endeavors. Your attitude - your perspective, your outlook, how you feel about yourself, how you feel about other people-determines your priorities, your actions, your values. Your attitude determines how you interact with other people and how you interact with yourself.
I think, growing up in a small town - I grew up in a lot of different places. I grew up in a city environment, a more suburban environment, a more rural environment. That's the beauty of New Jersey is you get a lot of different types of living.
I grew up in Harlem in New York, very rough, urban environment, and so what I found is that, if I can have kids travel to different places, countries, areas, it can expand their minds.