In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

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.

But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.

I'm concerned about myself, but I'm less concerned about 'only myself'.

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

This one word 'grace' contains within itself the whole of New Testament theology.

Marxists have more than once pointed out that the capitalist world economic system contains in itself the seeds of a general crisis and of warlike clashes.

Men write many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where every man has a voice, brutal laws are impossible

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.

What's come to perfection perishes. Things learned on earth we shall practice in heaven; Works done least rapidly Art most cherishes.

Power is knowing your past.

Nobody really knows anybody completely, even if they've been married to 'em for 53 years, you know?