I've been in contact with music since I was four or five years old through my father, because of the interest he had in music and all his musical skills. I finally managed to make that my profession.

We need self-confidence in our ability to build Africa. I trust in Mali and I trust in music.

You just have to try before thinking that you can't.

There are some things around us that are not actually useful. I didn't know that before. It's very new for me to understand. That became my way of writing: I can see also the new myself.

It's a great experience just to understand that finally being well known is not the most important thing.

The interesting thing for me is to put together all my influences and all my experiences I got through my traveling with my father.

When you are able to make a living with your job as an artist, that means you have an audience and you have to thank this audience.

Sometimes there are painters or very famous artists who start to become artists after they are dead because an audience or a public know about their art after they die.

When you have a chance to be an artist with an audience in your lifetime, you have to say thanks to your audience. That's a great thing. That's the best thing that can happen to an artist.

You can be a star here in Europe and not be known at all in the United States.

American audiences don't react in the same way as European ones to African music because, I think, Europeans listen to this music through all the festivals that exist here.

Silence is the mother of truth.

I want to be with you forever and beyond...

He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid.

Love is for the weak!

You punch me, I punch back. I do not believe it's good for one's self-respect to be a punching bag.

All means prove but blunt instruments, if they have not behind them a living spirit.

The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

The experiences show us just as we are; they make us see our own defects.

Get some money, buy a red coffeepot, move out. Find a new place to plug it in.

Rin slept inside the oak’s thought. Its own memories of weather and growth continued to hum, and like a pond, its stillness reflected back herself.