Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.

Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

I am somebody cause God don't make no junk

Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.

Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.

Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.

All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.

Whenever I write for hotel reservations, I always enclose a set of rules I have made for the hotels.

Dreams become reality once the dreamer goes beyond imagining and acts them out.

Believe in yourself and in your inner strength. You can do anything you want. Just put your mind to it!

Don't quote me that's what you heard not what I said.

This is my advice to entrepreneurs. It's easy to give up, but believe in your ideas. Surround yourself with people you respect and are smarter than you.

We intersect. He says he thanks every star that we existed on the same celestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man-made throughway for intersecting dreams.

Your dreams should never be better than your real life

As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of making music is to get it heard by as many people as possible.

I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.

I had a publisher who felt comics were just for little kiddies, so he never wanted me to use words of more than two syllables.

Once I was adviced never to trust a pretty face. Well, and what should I do when a meet a shithead?