I do love to sing Jacques Brel songs, intensely. I get terribly excited, just by reading a couple of lines in any one of his songs.

You've got to learn to leave the table When love's no longer being served".

I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.

What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.

You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.

Life is short. People are not easy to know. They're not easy to know, so if you don't tell them how you feel, you're not going to get anywhere, I feel.

You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.

Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it

There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

What you truly own, is what you have inside you. Everything else can be destroyed, robbed or wasted.

O thrush your song is passing sweet But never a song that you have sung Is half so sweet as thrushes sang When my dear love and I were young.

History is simply a piece of paper covered with print the main thing is still to make history not to write it.

I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty.

We have all heard of the web of life. The way we live threatens to trap us in a web of death.

Beginning on day one, our administration went to work to tackle challenges.

I want to find myself a girl who can show me what laughter means, and we'll fill in the missing numbers in each others paint-by-numbers dreams.

Living movements do not come out of committees.

I do watch 'American Idol' sometimes. It's not really that pleasurable... I take that back. It is the epitome of a guilty pleasure. Sometimes there's some good singers on that show.

When the mind, one-pointed and fully focused, knows the supreme silence in the Heart, this is true learning.