Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.

You've got to learn to leave the table When love's no longer being served".

I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.

What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.

You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.

Life is short. People are not easy to know. They're not easy to know, so if you don't tell them how you feel, you're not going to get anywhere, I feel.

You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.

Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it

There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

And it's hard to hate someone once you understand them.

Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.

The Lord gave us two ends - one to sit on and the other to think with. Success depends on which one we use the most.

I continue to believe when I said in Hanover, that the E.U. remains one of the world's great political and economic achievements, and that those achievements should not be taken for granted.

I do enjoy life, I really do. Especially if I wake up the next day.

It's the emotional trigger points that are important to me because I know if I could believe in the characters and try and imagine how they felt then I'd be able to do something quite honest.

And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation.

My persistence is the measure of the belief I have in myself.

Some kinds of baseness are nobly undergone.