Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don't know if I would've been that committed to that particular life.

The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from.

Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years.

When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.

Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.

Funk never dies. It is eternal. It just smells a little different from time to time.

How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

Music has the power to stop time. But music also keeps time.

Just because the laws were changed doesn't mean that the attitudes have changed.

Hip-hop is so much about character and caricature that people just see you as a character. Very rarely are you flesh and bone to people.

We have to get back to "we." It's important to get back to "we" not just "I."

People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.("The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith" - Version 1)

There was a great deal of progress being made, right under their noses, particularly in Africa, and this progress was good. Life was much harder for tyrants than it had been before.

Night when deep sleep falleth on men.

I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.

I watch mediocre shows that have been on for three or four seasons, and feel angry at them.

The greatest judgment which God himself can, in the present life, inflict upon a man is to leave him in the hand of his own boasted 'free'-will.

I was never taught how to raise a child, because I wasn't raised properly.

The biggest lies we save for ourselves.

My father Time is weak and gray With waiting for a better day; See how idiot-like he stands, Fumbling with his palsied hands!

I like a bit of color myself, I must say. At my time of life, if you wear nothing but black, people might think you were too mean to change frocks between funerals.