There is a big confusion in this country over what we want verses what we need...you need food. You want a chocolate sundae.

Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.

When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.

Accept who you are; and revel in it.

Death ends a life, not a relationship.

This is part of what a family is about, not just love. It's knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame. Not work.

We all yearn for what we have lost. But sometimes, we forget what we have.

The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.

Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.

Nothing haunts us like the things we don't say.

Don't cling to things because everything is impermanent.

No matter what gifts you have, practice is the only way to get better at anything."If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery it would not seem so wonderful at all” - Michael Angelo

[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.

That's what happens if you don't address the darkness in you. You become repressed and depressed and suicidal.

The trouble is it's very difficult to pin-point the most important thing because Aids affects everyone in different levels of society, differently and you have to respond to it differently.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

I try to be as realistic as possible.

If I had a lover who wanted to hear from me every day, I would break with him.

In Jamaica, you're never very far away from people who don't have very much, and in Wilmette, pretty much everybody had a lot.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.