Kenya Barris

“Laurence Fishburne - he's a great actor, but he dances and sings, too? He can just do everything.”

“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 hear people say, 'I'm not a role model' all the time, and it's like, 'Well, of course you're not!' It doesn't mean that people aren't going to look at you as one, though.”

“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.”

“I don't know Channing Dungey well, but we have talked several times, and she seems like an amazing executive.”

“ABC has a general policy that you can't show images of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.”

“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.”

“My wife is a doctor, and we had a decent life financially. My kids were going to nice schools and had nannies. We weren't rich, but we were better off than I was growing up. And I looked around, and I was like, 'Who are these people?' It was the opposite of what I remembered growing up.”

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

“I dug deep, and I found that there were people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump - because they saw what they believed was going to be hope and change, and under Obama, their particular lives did not change.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“'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.”

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

“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.”