A biography for Cord Jeffersonhasn’t been written yet.
“I have never been a physically daring man.”
“I'm afraid of heights such that my palms begin to sweat when I go up high flights of stairs in shopping malls.”
“My mother told me she thought I had clinical depression when I was 19 years old. And I thought, you're crazy because, you know, I was like, I get out of bed. I go exercise. I eat healthy.”
“I never worked directly in book publishing, but New York media is adjacent.”
“I think that was one of the reasons I loved 'Moonlight.' I don't remember if there's a single white person in that movie. It's just about Black people.”
“The world takes from us relentlessly. It takes our friends and first loves. It takes our parents. It takes our faith. It takes our dignity. It takes our passion. It takes our health. It takes our honesty, and it takes our credulity.”
“I've come to think about my heart the way others think about god, an all-powerful force I can't see that could wipe me out on a whim.”
“The hostility directed at writers who cover minority beats in America is solid proof that those people are doing important work. But that work can be exhausting.”
“Nobody ever talks about William & Mary in pop culture!”
“It may make you feel nice to pretend that the societies that gave rise to the modern world were ones of pure honor and decency, but that's not reality.”
“It's exhausting to always be writing and thinking about a new person being racist or sexist or otherwise awful. It's exhausting to feel compelled on a consistent basis to defend your claim to dignity.”
“It should go without saying that there's no outside arbiter of who 'deserves' which woman, or of what one 'deserves' to receive from a woman, because women get to decide for themselves.”
“Having lived in New York and Los Angeles, I'm keenly aware that fashion has never been about inclusion - be it for the benefit of minorities (save gays), the poor or really anyone outside of a few major, expensive, Western cities.”
“For me, being an artist was a thing that, like, rich people in New York and L.A. and Paris and Rome did. It wasn't something for me.”
“When I first started working in... television, for instance, I didn't know that people who write for television generally choose one: either drama or comedy. That is the path. And so when I got into it, I just thought that, well, I want to do both.”
“I have loved Erika Alexander since I first saw her in 'Living Single' when I was a kid. I was obsessed with that show. It played a big part in my life.”
“One of my father's better tendencies is to take in human beings who have somehow been led astray.”
“Art is subjective. Just because an executive, or even if five executives say that they don't like the idea and that they don't wanna make it, that doesn't mean that it's not good.”
“I never wanted to police Blackness or police art.”
“I'm not sure how we got to a place in which it's considered a political act to buy fast food, but here we are.”