I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

Whenever someone starts talking about 'fair competition' or indeed, about 'fairness' in general, it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked.

The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).

You increase your joy by increasing the pure joy of others.

One's own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable.

I've learnt that if I tell myself I'm not allowed something, I binge on it later. So if I want chocolate, I have chocolate. If I want biscuits, I have biscuits. I love cake. I just love cake.

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

My motto in life is 'Take risks;' you don't have a voice if you don't. You have to venture outside your boundaries. That's what life's all about.

Most of the time, creative entrepreneurs lose interest long before their marketing message loses its power.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.