“I’ve been grinding a really long time, and I’ve been broke for a lot of years. I may not have looked like it because, if you’re fly, you don’t need a dollar – you just need charisma. But I was riding hope as currency for a very long time. I feel like now, more than ever, I’m in my purpose, and comedy is the foundation of that.”
― Amanda Seales
“Every New Year comes with a list of predictions. Self-predictions, world predictions, how many times Lindsay Lohan will get arrested predictions, etc. I reserve the annual trend for people with genuine psychic ability and/or bloggers.”
― Amanda Seales
“You’re flawless when you embrace the things about you that you don’t necessarily like, but you own them because they’re yours.”
― Amanda Seales
“I definitely am very secure with my body and my likes and dislikes and the imperfections that some might call flaws. I’m like, ‘Those are my thighs; it’s just what it is.’ I think a lot of that has to do also with… women being a lot more vocal about the fact that, you know, being flawless is false.”
― Amanda Seales
“My thing about creating things is that it has to do two purposes: It has to serve me creatively but also has to serve the people.”
― Amanda Seales
“If I couldn’t get to where I wanted to by being my organic self – which is a smart, funny, unapologetically black woman – then I felt like it’s not worth doing it if I can’t do it the most organic way possible. Which is why I left the music business.”
― Amanda Seales
“Contrary to far too popular a belief, style, fashion, and fabulousness are not synonymous with stank, haughty, and self-aggrandizing.”
― Amanda Seales
“The truth is what facts are. I like facts. I like things to line up and be clear, and when we are honest and true about things, it helps things to make sense, and it cuts out a lot of the fat that gets in the way and causes for the misunderstandings that I believe lead to violence and… dysfunction, etc.”
― Amanda Seales
“Exactly what I’m doing is what success looks like. I get to create on my own terms, on my own timeline, and I’m able to support myself and my mom and my cat comfortably.”
― Amanda Seales
“I just love being able to create and make things that inspire and that make people laugh, and my motivation to keep going is to make more opportunities to do that.”
― Amanda Seales
“I’ve played with jazz and toyed with it when I used to live near the St. Nicholas Pub in Harlem.”
― Amanda Seales
“I have a theory that when you’re lost on the path, go back to the beginning and try the maze again.”
― Amanda Seales
“I am black, and I loved ‘Django.’”
― Amanda Seales
“Drake ain’t fake.”
― Amanda Seales
“My goal is to just have options.”
― Amanda Seales
“I always say your truth is your compass to your purpose.”
― Amanda Seales
“I’m a weirdo and an only child. That comes together to create one-woman shows.”
― Amanda Seales
“If you’re not good at juggling, then you’re not juggling. I always tell people that. If you’re dropping a lot of balls, then maybe you shouldn’t juggle. And that’s fine… there’s different ways of working.”
― Amanda Seales
“Anytime I don’t have to wear a bra is a good day.”
― Amanda Seales
“In hip hop, ‘real’ has always meant one who represents in actuality what they present in imagery. For instance, once upon a time, if a rapper spoke about being gangsta, they needed to truly be that, or they were ‘frontin.’”
― Amanda Seales
“I’m an artist through and through.”
― Amanda Seales
“I don’t have the proportions for ‘hood hot.’”
― Amanda Seales
“I’m a nerd.”
― Amanda Seales
“I love cars.”
― Amanda Seales
“I think it’s always been especially hard for black people to let go of musicians who do heinous things because music is such an integral part of our existence.”
― Amanda Seales
“As a lover of both hip-hop and jazz, I feel like much of the latter community still doesn’t truly embrace hip-hop as a musical extension.”
― Amanda Seales
“Jazz does what it wants to, and so does The Wu.”
― Amanda Seales
“My first encounter with Wu-Tang Clan came when I ordered six CDs from those throwback catalog orders, from Columbia House or something, and ’36 Chambers’ was one of them. It was on from then.”
― Amanda Seales
“I am from Florida, so I didn’t ‘grow up’ on Wu-Tang.”
― Amanda Seales
“When my hair is picked out, my whole aura is picked out, like, ‘See this, see me.’”
― Amanda Seales
“My hair changes with my emotions… and my purpose for the day.”
― Amanda Seales
“Cornrows came back with a vengeance in the early ’00s with every dude trying to grow his hair out to get ‘braided up.’ It was crazy. Girls were getting carpal tunnel in hoods across America trying to make plaits out of 1.5 inches of ungreased hair.”
― Amanda Seales
“Ladies and dentists will agree: Iverson has one of the best smiles to ever grin. This is uncontested. No argument! And he was very generous with it as well. Whether during a game, press conference, or photoshoot, Iverson was free with his cheesing.”
― Amanda Seales
“I am all at once in awe and in confusion at some of the folks I encounter during fashion week, consistently causing me to mutter to myself or whoever’s in earshot, ‘Is that really necessary?’”
― Amanda Seales
“Fashion week is not an episode of ‘Girls’ or ‘Friends,’ where I’m OK that there is not a black person in sight because I honestly believe these characters don’t come into contact with – therefore don’t have – any black friends. No, in the case of Fashion week, it feels wrong.”
― Amanda Seales
“Whether you like him or not, hip hop needs Drake.”
― Amanda Seales
“From the beginning with ‘So Far Gone,’ Drake’s work has been to find a way to deftly balance his singing and his rapping.”
― Amanda Seales
“When I came into stand-up, I found a certain safe space of intellectualism, of camaraderie, of excellence that really has always been natural to me but always felt foreign in the other spaces I’ve been in.”
― Amanda Seales
“I come from an academic background, and I have a genuine interest in social change.”
― Amanda Seales
“I look to icons like George Carlin, Chris Rock, and Richard Pryor on how to present these concepts of social change and subversiveness to an audience in a way that’s palatable.”
― Amanda Seales
“’Smart, Funny and Black’ is about celebrating, critiquing and learning about black culture, black history, and the black experience.”
― Amanda Seales
“For my web series ‘Get Your Life,’ I wrote that and produced it and starred in it so that I could have a body of work that represents my voice as a writer and as a performer.”
― Amanda Seales
“’Smart Funny and Black’ is basically a live black pop culture game show that I created. We have a live band. We have two contestants that we call ‘blacksperts.’ They come on stage and compete in games that I’ve created that test their knowledge of black culture, black history, and the black experience.”
― Amanda Seales
“I paint because I love to paint. If someone buys the prints or whatever, so be it, but it’s not my main form of business. As a performer, that is my main form of business.”
― Amanda Seales
“My mom is an incredibly direct person, and I like things to make sense.”
― Amanda Seales
“Comedy has allowed me to be my 100-percent-true self, as opposed to other places, where I feel like that’s been a hindrance. Whether it’s music or poetry or hosting, people want you to be something else: they want you to be packaged in a certain way.”
― Amanda Seales
“I’ve always been funny, but I never considered it as a particular career path until my early 30s, when I realized that hip-hop wasn’t going to be the long term.”
― Amanda Seales
“Whether you agree with Trump or not, you can’t deny he looks like a piece of pizza with the cheese off. It’s just what it is.”
― Amanda Seales
“I know some people would be like, ‘Why are you responding to these racists on Twitter?’ Sometimes it’s for the purpose of letting them know they’re being watched and that they’re going to have to answer for their words.”
― Amanda Seales
“I want to see my career evolve into limitlessness.”
― Amanda Seales
“I want to be able to do what I want to do and have people care about it.”
― Amanda Seales
“In most cases, a year older is a good thing. More wisdom, more experience, and less damns given.”
― Amanda Seales
“Even when I was in school, I was doing papers and writing poems; I always had an edge to my delivery. It was never conscious, but it was more so my organic way of thinking about things.”
― Amanda Seales
“I speak from a black woman’s perspective, and that’s a specific perspective, but sometimes there are things I want to be understood by folks who may not have an entryway into that concept, so I have to think about how I can open the space to bring those people in. And that does require balance.”
― Amanda Seales
“’Smart Funny & Black’ came about because I felt that black comedians were being considered as only capable of a certain type of comedy – sort of physical, kind of silly – and I felt like we are not a monolith, and our comedy isn’t, either.”
― Amanda Seales
“Wokeness, for what it’s worth, is a buzzword that a lot of people are not truly understanding the depth of. I think sometimes things work their way into the zeitgeist, and they lose their weight. And wokeness is one of those words that has reached that point.”
― Amanda Seales
“Growing up, dating seemed pretty straightforward: If someone was interested in getting to know you on a romantic level, they approached, exchanged info, and proceeded to communicate with you in a consistent fashion between outings of various natures.”
― Amanda Seales
“Ideally, we date the folks who are dating for the same reason we are.”
― Amanda Seales
“I don’t do things that I’m not good at.”
― Amanda Seales
“I used to work at Sirius. And when I got my job at Sirius, I was only 21. It was my first job out of college. And when I think back to what 21 was, though, you’re an idiot.”
― Amanda Seales
“Auditioning for people you know is way more stressful than auditioning for people you don’t know. And you have to pretend that you don’t know because they’re just staring at you.”
― Amanda Seales
“As an artist, it’s incredible to see folks see you and then be able to give that back and to be able to send two girls to a Black Girls Empowerment camp.”
― Amanda Seales
“I think, for a long time, I didn’t have people who understood where I was coming from. They were giving me advice on what would be good for them.”
― Amanda Seales
“For a long time, I didn’t have a balance in terms of my worth and my market value; I was just a very talented person who hadn’t done any work that truly demonstrated my talent.”
― Amanda Seales
“I’ve made it my business to condition and train folks to understand that you’ll never know what’s going to come out of my mouth.”
― Amanda Seales
“As a black woman, the government is so much in my life, and it always has been.”
― Amanda Seales
“I’m not hostile. I’m passionate.”
― Amanda Seales
“I was in the music industry as Amanda Diva for 10 years but I realized that I had bigger work to do and needed to get busy doing that work. I really do believe that I’m here for a bigger purpose, and I want to be a role model and speak for the black community and black women specifically. Humor was the way it felt most organic and effective for me.”
― Amanda Seales
“In music, you ain’t really got to be able to sing. In comedy, you may be cute, you may be able to add a little extra to your routine, but if you’re not funny, no one’s really rocking with you – and if you’re a black woman, you better be hilarious. As usual, we always have to do the most.”
― Amanda Seales
“I have planted my flag in my comedy being useful for social change.”
― Amanda Seales
“When people agree with you, they’ll just like it and keep it moving, but when people don’t agree with you, that’s when they come for your whole neck.”
― Amanda Seales
“I can’t even believe that in 2018, I still have to lay out why diversity in anything matters.”
― Amanda Seales
“America was made for white men. Literally, at the time of the writing of the new country’s Constitution, only white men could own land, and only men who owned land could vote.”
― Amanda Seales
“To act like everyone has had the same access to share their funny is willful ignorance at its best – and just a good ol’ fashioned front at its truth.”
― Amanda Seales
“When I speak of diversity, I don’t mean replacement of white comics. I don’t mean acceptance by white comics. We comics who weren’t born into the white guy paradigm of ‘funny’ don’t need a handout. We don’t need a PC push. We don’t need ‘a look.’”
― Amanda Seales
“The amount of silliness that happens to me is insane.”
― Amanda Seales
“My brain doesn’t work in a typical linear fashion: my brain is vibrant and fast and bright and on 10,000 all the time.”
― Amanda Seales
“I’m constantly fighting the angry black woman stigma, the ‘You’re pretty, you can’t be funny’ stigma.”
― Amanda Seales
“I want to create and write scripted and unscripted shows, digital shows, stage shows.”
― Amanda Seales
“My whole intention is to break down these limitations of what a black comedian is supposed to be and to open up a space.”
― Amanda Seales
“For a lot of comics who aren’t as silly or physical but more intellectual, we get looked at as ‘alt comics.’ No, I’m still a black comic, and there are black people who want to hear my type of black comedy, but that space hasn’t been built out for us.”
― Amanda Seales
“I feel like I have a unique voice that’s true and authentic, and we need more of that. If I can inspire more of that, I need to do that in as many places as possible.”
― Amanda Seales
“My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn’t until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.”
― Amanda Seales
“I’ve always found inspiration in icons that were really of purpose in their craft or calling. From Bob Marley to Maya Angelou to Malcolm X, inspiration came from seeing how committed they were to their vision and determining it themselves.”
― Amanda Seales
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