I'd like to do something involving jazz. But books are how I earn my living, and I'd like to stay with the horse I rode in on.

God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.

I asked her if I was black or white. She replied "You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

If you have the material it will form itself as a kind of connective tissue.

People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.

I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn't count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.

I put headlights in Ford vans. I still drive a Ford.

It is hard to find romance in the present because there's nothing left to the imagination.

Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.

As the adults, we are the ones who set the stage for vitality, love, or disharmony in the home. We set ourselves up for one or the other, and our children take their cues from us.

There is no such thing in anyone's life as an unimportant day.

ILLUSTRIOUS, adj. Suitably placed for the shafts of malice, envy and detraction.

Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and bad English.

Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

I think a revolution transitioning from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy - somebody's going to be the 21st-century clean-energy superpower.

I was suppose to be a Jesuit priest or a naval academy graduate.

The Logos was divine, not the divine Being himself.

Reality can easily become the current fantasy.