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

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.

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.

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.

Don't believe everything you are told, if it resonates within you, then listen and act.

Nothing seems to tempt fate more than mentioning the possibility of something bad happening.

It is amazing, though, what pains your subconscious will undergo in achieve sustainable peace.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

I now want to be playing parts more interesting to me and more exciting to me.

It’s vital that you accept yourself and learn to be happy with who God made you to be. If you want to truly enjoy your life, you must be at peace with yourself.

Like the vast majority of my constituents, I continue to be concerned about record profits reported by petroleum companies at a time when consumers are paying record high prices for gasoline.

No amount of virtuosic skill and choice of subject matter can be a substitute for depth and poetry.

A film has a sort of life over time, whereas a TV show comes up in your living room, and its immediate, and people write about it.