Artists are the emotional historians of the world.

Good art and a good life answers questions. Great art and a great life asks questions.

Your life is a work of art that you will work on the rest of your life.

We have always been searching for home. It's in our art... our religion... everything.

As an immigrant, there's a little part of you that always says, "Well, I'm not a hundred percent American." America is some other little boy or some other place I haven't been to yet.

What was transformative was being at the inauguration, reading my poem, and realizing that the quest for home and identity had always been part of my work, but that I'd been home all along.

But love and pain are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other. Sometimes that's how we know we're alive.

He laid the foundation of a universal government. His law was one for all. Equal justice and love for everyone.

A good beginning makes a good end.

Grief. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.

Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice.

No one chair should be isolated.

They always say 'youth is wasted on the young' - there's something to that.

I think at any point, as an artist, whatever the medium - just having an audience means the world.

Always cut the cards...and smile when you lose.

A humble knowledge of ourselves is a surer way to God than is the search for depth of learning.