Trevor Noah

Most of my show is true; like, 90% of everything I say on stage is true. I just have to find the way to make it funny - that's the difficult thing.

I'm literally driving in the middle of the night, and my phone rings, and my manager says, 'How would you like to be the host of the Daily Show?' I get out the car, and I didn't have legs. You know in those movies where there's an explosion? But instead of the sound of the explosion, you hear the silence. That's literally what happened.

The truth is, people don't know me. When people don't know you, they're going to try to get to know you as quickly as possible, because you're now taking the place of somebody that they love dearly, or somebody that they hate sincerely, and so they need to know who you are.

I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.

__ knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom.

It's a powerful experience, shitting. There's something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don't care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyonce shits. The pope shits. The Queen of England shits. When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All of that goes away. You are never more yourself than when you're taking a shit. You have that moment where you realize, 'This is me. This is who I am.

Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her.

I know you see me as some crazy old bitch nagging at you," she said, "but you forget the reason I ride you so hard and give you so much shit is because I love you. Everything I have ever done I've done from a place of love. If I don't punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesn't love you. If the police get you, the police don't love you. When I beat you, I'm trying to save you. When they beat you, they're trying to kill you.

As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn__ know any of it had anything to do with __ace._ I didn't know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me "white", even though I was light brown, I just thought that they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn't learned them properly. "Ah, yes, my friend. You've confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how you made that mistake. You're not the first.

Don't fight the system, mock the system

People say all the time that they__ do anything for the people they love. But would you really? Would you do anything? Would you give everything? I don__ know that a child knows that kind of selfless love. A mother, yes. A mother will clutch her children and jump from a moving car to keep them from harm. She will do it without thinking. But I don__ think the child knows how to do that, not instinctively. It__ something the child has to learn.

My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.

In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.

Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don__ pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side.

In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don__ see the person it affects. We don__ see their face. We don__ see them as people.

The dogs left with us and we walked. I sobbed the whole way home, still heartbroken. My mom had no time for my whining.__hy are you crying?!___ecause Fufi loves another boy.___o? Why would that hurt you? It didn__ cost you anything. Fufi__ here. She still loves you. She__ still your dog. So get over it.__ufi was my first heartbreak. No one has ever betrayed me more than Fufi. It was a valuable lesson to me. The hard thing was understanding that Fufi wasn__ cheating on me with another boy. She was merely living her life to the fullest. Until I knew that she was going out on her own during the day, her other relationship hadn__ affected me at all. Fufi had no malicious intent.I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn__ true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I__e felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal. They__l come to me angry and crying and talking about how they__e been cheated on and lied to, and I feel for them. I understand what they__e going through. I sit with them and buy them a drink and I say, __riend, let me tell you the story of Fufi.

Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. You will face more hate and ridicule and ostracism than you can even begin to fathom. People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive. That is what happened to me in Eden Park.

One day you__e going to get arrested, and when you do, don__ call me. I__l tell the police to lock you up just to teach you a lesson._ Because there were some black parents who__ actually do that, not pay their kid__ bail, not hire their kid a lawyer__he ultimate tough love. But it doesn__ always work, because you__e giving the kid tough love when maybe he just needs love. You__e trying to teach him a lesson, and now that lesson is the rest of his life.