I am the first instrument. I am the voice. I do not imitate other instruments. Other instruments imitate me.

The best thing you can do is to be a woman and stand before the world and speak your heart.

Sing a song correctly and you live forever.

I don't have to lay on the couch and see a therapist because my therapist is in my paint brushes.

It's a spirit that was given me and the relationships and meeting all these great people, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong; through Max I met a lot of people too. My first album was with Benny Carter.

I was looking for the people who were making the music inside the cabinet. I would look in there and see if I could find somebody who was making all this wonderful music.

You can never loose a thing If it belongs to you.

I think that's what really a substantial work is, it's forever. It's the truth now and it was the truth then, and it will be the truth tomorrow.

We have inherited a great music. This music is a holdover. It comes with us like the skin, the texture of our hair. It's our memory banks.

Nothing can contaminate the purity of my love—not even the dirt of hateful thoughts.

Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.

Nothing has yet been offered to invalidate the doctrine that the meaning of the Constitution may as well be ascertained by the Legislative as by the Judicial authority.

Let us refuse to be silent! Speaking freely is a decisive step forward on the road to freedom.

I grew up a vegetarian. Then, because I grew up in the states, I started slowly eating meat. First it was bologna sandwiches, or pepperoni on pizza.

Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new... but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design?

You can't make any one person your world. The trick is to take what each can give you and build a world from it.

The love that makes community is the willingness to do someone else's dirty work.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

And so from that, I've always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.