Top 40 Kenya Barris Quotes

Jill Soloway is a friend of mine. She does ‘Transparent,’ and she’s amazingly funny and brilliant and bright. And I love her show.

Honestly, I regret not having spanked my kids.

I have a ‘hope for the best, expect the worst’ mentality.

I tried to do Kwanzaa with my family and was like, ‘This sucks. What am I doing this for?’ For me, I felt like I was doing it because I was trying to live up to someone else’s idea of what ‘black’ was.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn’t make you feel something, then it’s probably a failure.

Of all the ‘Black-ish’ characters, Zoey is most like my daughter, who goes to U.S.C.

I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.

When you’re in the middle of it, when you’re a kid growing up, you don’t think, ‘This is my first heartbreak.’ You just think, ‘My heart is broken.’ But then as a parent, you look back, and you see your child go through his or her first heartbreak, and you’re realizing, ‘Oh my God, this is her first heartbreak.’

For me, it was important to keep my name in ‘mainstream Hollywood.’

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

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.

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 have five kids, and people can say ‘nature versus nurture,’ but it is nature! Nurture has so little to do with it. I have five kids, and there are five totally different people in my house.

I want to start really developing more on the film side.

No one’s pro-police brutality.

I know a lot for me, personally, the best moments have come from watching my kids have an experience I never thought about as a kid but then remembered as a parent.

Laurence Fishburne – he’s a great actor, but he dances and sings, too? He can just do everything.

I think that’s the key to any artistic endeavor: You want it to feel fresh and not have people look at it like it’s re-creation of something else unless it’s done in a really strong way.

I’m doing another pilot about a black Democratic pundit who’s married to a white Republican pundit. And the purpose of me wanting to do that show – and ABC sort of supported me in the way they did – is because I feel like, you know, the political system is like an old married couple.

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.

There’s never really been a true apology for slavery.

If Adam Sandler does a bad movie, he doesn’t bring down the whole white race. But if Tyler Perry does, it’s like, ‘See what you guys do?’ and that type of thing.

I feel like money is an interesting thing when you don’t come from it.

When you reach a level of status – and making it to college is an accomplishment in itself – you are trying to define who you are.

Comedy used to be a vehicle for change. Now, comedy has gotten to this quirky, nonsensical place, which I enjoy. But I do think there is room for discussion-based humor. We can tell those stories in a way that feels edifying.

No civil rights movement has gotten anywhere without the help of white liberals.

I love Meryl Streep.

The small moments I’ve had to talk with President Obama, I’ve told him, ‘I get it.’ His presidency was in some ways almost overshadowed by the fact that he was the first black president.

‘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.

I will be so happy when ‘diversity’ is not a word.

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.

Everybody – every single person – has a story. Find yours and tell it in your voice.

I wanted to be a doctor, because I grew up on ‘Cosby.’

I wanted to do a show about a family that is absolutely black. Because as Du Bois has shown, we do have to live a double consciousness every day in the world. We have to walk our path and walk the mainstream path, and there’s never really been a show that’s talked about what that’s like.

Writers’ rooms are terrifying. You take someone whose never done this before, and this is their life’s dream that is about to happen or not about to happen – that is an amazing amount of pressure to have.

I set out to tell my story, which is based on my family. Dr. Cosby told his story in ‘The Cosby Show.’ The comparisons stop there in terms of my creation of the show. We just both happen to have black fathers at the center of it.

You can have good times with anyone, but it’s really different and much more interesting when you look at how you get through the bad times with someone.

I still believe a little bit that changing gender roles have hurt relationships.

Sometimes you realize that life isn’t defined by the good times.

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.