I could always open shows, perform through the middle, and close shows.

Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.

Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

I am somebody cause God don't make no junk

Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.

Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.

Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.

All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.

You cannot operate from a place of love when you are emotionally unstable.

Where we see the same faults followed regularly by the same misfortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have known the first we might have avoided the others.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that refledts it.

In lovesickness we had found a common language.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

[Albert Camus] wasn't writing under the influence of the Nobel Prize. That was an external thing for the artist in him.

Aim not to win or succeed, but for excellence in the moment.

Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty ... like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.

Sometimes making people laugh or even making them scared can be accomplished by a good opening sequence.

Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.