Allow the artist to finish the piece of work before you critique it.

Her beauty cannot be measured with standards of a colonized mind

Any ideas of “other” are complicated, and otherness is relative to personal ideas of “normal.”

Once you encounter people who are really testing the limits of kindness, that's when you start to build up a shield and close yourself down.

I'm becoming more and more apolitical - I think the most revolutionary thing you can do is just live your life and have a good time. Before they scoop you up on the street or you die.

Your yes means nothing if you can't say no.

Music is like a lover that I can't commit to, but I seem to always find myself in bed with.

I am here no longer just a vision birthed into this body I accept my praise, my blame, my joy, my sorrow I realize we are, in truth, the truth we seek God, perfect this very moment.

It's hard being bisexual, omnisexual, multisexual, whatever you want to call it, when people have their agenda and expect you to just represent their agenda.

I stopped beating up on myself. I stopped asking myself why I didn't sell this number of records, why I don't have corporate sponsorship. I just don't buy into any of that anymore.

My legacy is in my family, not in my work. For me. I don't know about for other people. I try to forget a lot.

how often fears come to sour our life and prove, in the end, to have no foundation, no reason to exist

One with the law is a majority.

I like acting because I get to find different parts of myself, or at least create different parts that don't already exist, and see the world through someone else's eyes.

People want reality that tells them how right they are all the time.

The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.

I love that [ late-50s Verve recordings] - to me, that's the epitome of vocal jazz. It's my favorite style and era of it.

A good businessman sees where others don't see.

I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.

The true seeing is when there is no seeing.

In companies whose wealth is intellectual capital, networks, rather than hierarchies, are the right organizational design.