Cord Jefferson

“Becoming a man isn't a question of age, but experience.”

“The Black experience in America now includes everything, all the way up to being the president of the United States.' But there's genres for 'prestige Black projects:' slave overcoming adversity and escaping, Black civil rights activist overcoming white racism, inner-city gangland stuff, poverty and broken homes.”

“My professional life doesn't stop because my personal life is in shambles, and vice versa. It all happens at once and you've got to deal with it.”

“When my German-American mother married my black-American Indian father, her dad and stepmom disowned her immediately. They would have been upset had she married an Irishman - 'Those people kiss the filthy Blarney Stone,' my grandfather would say - but a dark man was practically incomprehensible, like marrying an ironing board.”

“I come from a background in TV, where there's a real commitment to character.”

“I fear losing faith in the power of one.”

“One of the reasons why I like making and watching TV is that time allows you to be discursive and digressive and go to weird places and spend time with characters in a nuanced and complex way.”

“Hardship and turmoil, I think, is the turning point for lots of young males, the moment when they say, 'Oh, so this is real life.'”

“I'd always rather spec something and just write it. Because when you're pitching something that isn't even on a page yet, it allows people to give notes on something that doesn't exist.”

“It should go without saying that women aren't carnival prizes to be won.”

“In a world in which man-made and natural disasters are only multiplying by the day, it's important to remember that we haven't lost everything until we've lost our ability to laugh.”

“Unfortunately, police violence and white supremacist violence are something that you can set your watch to in the United States of America.”

“I fear no longer being able to find glimmers of joy and hope in friends' weddings, the birth of children, the contours of a warm body next to me in bed or a hug from my mother.”

“We can't be miserable all the time. I think just as human beings, we have to find joy or else all is lost.”

“To me, even in the most miserable times, I've always found ways to laugh and enjoy myself and time with my family and friends. There are all these things that buoy your spirits.”

“Newspaper haters is a group of people that doesn't really exist, but, even if it did, it wouldn't be composed of people in Internet media. Those people, if they don't occasionally do odd jobs for papers and magazines themselves, have close friends who do.”

“When I think of my mother, I can't help but think of the head-spinning ignorance she endured to marry my dad and have me, from the familial isolation to the sidelong glances to the post-divorce date that ended when her suitor saw my picture and said, 'You didn't tell me you were married to a black.'”

“Succession,' in my mind, is the first successful British comedy in America, and the way that you get Americans to like British comedy is to call it a drama, 'cause Americans, if they see somebody that they kind of dislike, they're like, 'This isn't funny. Why am I supposed to be watching this person every week?'”

“Like any major clothing company, Polo hawks a lifestyle - or at least the dream of a lifestyle - just as much as it hawks shirts and belts.”

“My mother was raised in a very, very racist environment. She used to tell me that her father was such a bigot that he would say, 'You better not marry an Irishman, or a Jewish person.' Imagine somebody saying, 'Don't marry an Irishman,' and then you marry a Black man.”