I'm one of those people who just doesn't plan my personal life. I plan my professional life.

Ugly ducklings don't turn into swans and glide off down the lake. Whether your sunglasses are on or off, you only see the world you make.

The consolidation of the music business has made it difficult to encourage styles like the blues, all of which deserve to be celebrated as part of our most treasured national resources.

Religion is for people who are scared to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.

I never saw music in terms of men and women or black and white. There was just cool and uncool.

There were so many great music and political scenes going on in the late '60s in Cambridge. The ratio of guys to girls at Harvard was four to one, so all of those things were playing in my mind.

Life gets mighty precious when there's less of it to waste.

Solar power is the last energy resource that isn't owned yet - nobody taxes the sun yet.

It's incredible to see labor unions and environmentalists getting together to stop the corporate mentality that destroys both jobs and the environment.

We can live in fear or act out of hope.

It's always enjoyable to listen to a friend's work, but if it doesn't resonate with you, then you can just appreciate it and it inspires you in its own way.

The notion of "cause and effect" is sometimes useful in real life, and it can even be interesting in art, but I'm more interested in "cause and cause" or "effect and effect" or "and and and".

A little crazy is good

Differentiation of treatment is not motivated by the difference of value of the two races, but of the fundamental difference of their respective natures.

Bad cooks - and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen - have delayed human development longest and impaired it most.

Failure is part of success.

Basically, I composed the musical structure in one pass. The rest was editing and small adjustments. And when the play was read by actors with the music, the sequence timed-out perfectly.

I remember I was like five or six years old; I played the devil. That was my first role.

Veni, vidi, visa - I came, I saw, I charged it.

Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.

I couldn't tell if the streaker was a man or a woman because it had a bag on it's head.