I'm creative; I'm not re-creative.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

I don't follow what everybody else does.

Here in Seattle, I'm the most productive I've ever been. I don't allow myself personal distractions. I'm extremely disciplined here.

My concerns have been about myself and not about giving something back and putting something in, even though that's been in the back of my head.

My work sometimes can be abstract and appear not to have a direct relationship to Afro-American concerns, but, in fact, it is based on that.

I'm tired of watching you be in love with someone else someone who will never love you back, not the way I do.

A man is merely to implement the law. He is there not to decide what to implement as we already have the law. We don't have a legislative body.

When yer in a funk, people in love are a royal pain in the patookus.

No education deserves the name unless it develops thought, unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

This dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.

Clean your freakin' fryer. Be responsible for Christ's sake!

The strong is not the one who is physically powerful, but indeed, the one who controls himself when angry.

If I obey Jesus Christ, the redemption of God will flow through me to the lives of others, because behind the deed of obedience is the reality of Almighty God.

Songs, stories are beyond value; they are the memory and wisdom of a people, the particular individual rivers of the sea of life which constitutes us all.