Cheo Hodari Coker quotes:

The one thing you'll notice when you're walking through Harlem is every single passing car is playing different music and there's also music that's being played out of windows.

Harlem is filled with moments of history.

75%-90% of the murders that occur in black and Latino communities are solvable. Everybody knows who did it or somebody knows. The reason nobody talks is because snitches get stitches and people aren't bulletproof.

That's one thing that you notice in New York that you don't notice in LA is how much music is all over the place.

One of the things that's really the cornerstone of '90s hip-hop is sampling.

I know now it's a hashtag and people have various feelings about it, but really if you look at all black art, even in hip-hop, it's all about that I exist and these are my feelings and this is what I feel about the world. It's always been an undercurrent.

If you think about black art, all black art, whether it's Invisible Man or whether it's James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, or Richard Wright, they all deal with elements of identity and trying to humanize our experience and our struggle in the world where people have been indifferent to who we are and what we are. It's basically just saying that our lives have meaning.

If you're black living in the community and you want to change things, there are going to be things that happen. That's true of anybody. I mean you could use celebrity as a similar metaphor.

When you're a black superhero you can't erase the notion that you're black.

The only thing I can worry about is my swimming pool and keeping the leaves out of my swimming pool. I can't worry about what's happened to my neighbors.