I have this ability to find this hidden talent in people that sometimes even they didn't know they had.

Money had never been the main thing for me. It's the legacy that was important.

Motown was about music for all people – white and black, blue and green, cops and the robbers. I was reluctant to have our music alienate anyone.

There aren’t enough people who care about the future. They are too busy worrying about today and what they can grab now

Michael Jackson was not an artist who comes along once in a decade, a generation, or a lifetime. He was an artist who comes along only once, period… He raised the bar and then BROKE the bar!

I didn't want to be a big record mogul and all that stuff. I just wanted to write songs and make people laugh.

The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.

Today's business climate is not for me.

I'm a songwriter, that's what I love.

All artists have runners, people that tell them what to do, business managers, lawyers, these - if they get the right ones, they're lucky, and if they get the wrong ones, they're unlucky.

Motown was about music for all people - white and black, blue and green, cops and the robbers. I was reluctant to have our music alienate anyone.

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

O, worldly pomp, how despicable you are when one considers that you are empty and fleeting ! You are justly compared to watery bubbles, one moment all swollen up, then suddenly reduced to nothing.

I would prefer to live with bleeding heart where desire see darkness of uncertainty because I need to know the existence of love

Your choice is your choice and you need to accept what happens, not shift the blame to someone else if it doesn't turn out your way.

I'm a kindhearted but highly competitive pragmatist. When I seek to win something, I always make certain it's never at the expense of anything more serious than the inadequate efforts of others.

I could pull all kinds of games on my mother. I couldn't pull any games on my father.

Our Grub-street biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers on purpose to make a penny of him.

A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

We're all cracked vessels, and we're always in process, I think, every one of us.