Nothing is more flattering for a writer than when someone knows your work.

I think you're not really teaching anyone unless you're learning yourself.

For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.

I was so well loved by my mother that if people have any expectations of me I really don't notice because I'm hardest on myself.

Inspiration takes many forms, but it's rarely pure.

Challenging is good, like good conversation, yes? Who wants to have dinner with the same old easy listening music sounding friends all the time?

One of the things I noticed when I worked at Vibe was that backstage at a fashion show, they always referred to the black models as "black girls." I thought, "They never say 'white girls.'

Images are really powerful. People fall in love with images, and as a way of falling in love with someone because they're like an image.

People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.

Who says reading should be easy? Shouldn't it challenge you as hard sometimes as love. Maybe "hard" is not the right word in this context. Ha!

There were so few black men who were successful and who successfully conveyed black male fear - how America can make you feel crazy, and how America can create interesting levels of contradiction.

Fear was about possibilities. Not things that happened. Things that might.

I was wandering lonely and lost, till the musicyou played pulledmy soul into a vortex of emotions, reminding me thatI was still alive

No more roundabout discussions of what makes a good man. Be one!

Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. … All those things.

If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people.

The very truth hath a colour from the disposition of the utterer.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

I was playing when I invented the aqualung. I think play is the most serious thing in the world.

Yeah, I've been interested in music since I was a teenager, always writing songs.

We've done a miserable job of preparing people for today's world, let alone tomorrow's.