"People always want narratives to be clean and easy."
"In the deep corner of my heart, I'm a Chicagoan, but it's been covered over by 20 years of living in the Bay Area."
"I feel like, as a black guy, I can't not believe in God... I'd wake up in the morning, 'I'm black, and there's no God? I'm going back to sleep.'"
"Atheism is like the highest level of white privilege. It's like having a black belt in white privilege."
"I grew up in a household where we talked about race all the time, and that's sort of in me. So if I become the Anthony Bourdain of race and culture, then great!"
"Comedy can be very deep sometimes."
"I am a comedian: that means I laugh at things other people don't laugh at and also annoys my wife sometimes."
"I am proud to be black man."
"Women don't get the benefits of America the way men do."
"My dad and stepmom live in Mobile, Ala., and spend their vacation time an hour's drive away in Orange Beach, Ala. This means that, throughout my life, I have regularly vacationed there as well."
"Whenever I tell people in Berkeley, Calif., where I live, that I'm headed to the beach in Alabama, they are shocked. Most people outside of the Gulf Coast have no idea that Alabama has beaches - even though if you look at a map of Alabama, there is a part of it that looks as if it should belong to Florida."
"People live in their part of the Union, and if they don't travel a lot, then there is a tendency to believe that the other parts of America couldn't possibly be as American as their part. You can see it in the way people in the South scrunch up their faces when they hear words like 'New York,' 'Chicago,' and 'challah.'"
"I'm happy that I know how to speak 'Southern.' I spent a lot of time in Alabama throughout my life. I even lived there for part of junior high and high school, so I learned the true beauty and mastery of the Southern dialect. 'Y'all' is one of the greatest and most useful words ever invented."
"The Olympics are great, but they only truly mean something when the moments that come out of them are bigger than the individual sports."
"The alt-right is the Tea Party's younger, cooler, meaner brother. Like if the movie 'Back to The Future' was just about Biff."
"We all need to make sure that we fully understand our country."
"The alt-right is working hard to cloak its desire to create chaos in the streets as free speech. They say they want to air their views, but it's about provoking violent reactions. We all can easily see that this is not about free speech."
"Puerto Rico is complicated. The people are complicated. The history is complicated. The story of the United States' relationship to Puerto Rico is complicated."
"People born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens - except for the teeny, tiny, mind-boggling fact that if you live in Puerto Rico, you are not allowed to cast a vote in the election for president. That tiny fact starts to get bigger when you realize that electing our own leaders is the whole reason that we have a country in the first place."
"The citizens of Puerto Rico pay taxes with no representation every day, because Puerto Rico is not a state. And the rules only became more confusing the more I looked into them during my time there."
"Growing up in the Midwest, Boston, and Alabama, I didn't know any Puerto Ricans... at least, I didn't know if I knew any Puerto Ricans. The only Puerto Rican that I had ever even heard of was Juan Epstein, one of the students from the classic 1970s sitcom 'Welcome Back, Kotter.'"
"Chicago is a world-class city filled with amazing people with big ideas."
"Knowing that more people associate Chicago with street violence than generosity is difficult for me because, despite all my proclamations of being from the Bay Area, I have spent much of my life in Chicago. So I have a deep love and a pretty good understanding of the city."
"One thing that people outside Chicago need to understand is that the city is not just one thing. It is one city, but it is huge and sprawling. And historically, it has been one of America's most segregated cities."
"The size of the city and the nature of how independent the neighborhoods are means that not only do people who live outside Chicago not know what is going on there, Chicagoans often don't know what is going on there."
