Quotes from Kenya Barris

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

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.

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

I love Meryl Streep.

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.

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.

'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.

As much as we want to say racism is dead, it's still rearing its ugly head constantly.

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.

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

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.

We should be aware and constantly having conversations about the world because that's how you change it from the bigger standpoint rather than acutely trying to change things.

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

Comedy used to be a vehicle for change. Now, comedy has gotten to this quirky, nonsensical place, which I enjoy. But I do think there is room for discussion-based humor. We can tell those stories in a way that feels edifying.

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

I have five kids, and people can say 'nature versus nurture,' but it is nature! Nurture has so little to do with it. I have five kids, and there are five totally different people in my house.

I love Donald Glover.

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.

Whenever you put a family together, they may share some points of views and morals, but there are going to be differences.

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.

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