I wanted to come back to the guitar after three albums and almost 10 years. I started to miss this instrument and I wanted to come back to the guitar.

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.

We never truly "get over" a loss, but we can move forward and evolve from it.

Ability may take you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.

Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

Love may be a ring that has no end, but the logic is far from circular.

Happiness is always the inaccessible castle which sinks in ruin when we set foot on it.

Love kindled by virtue always kindles another, provided that its flame appear outwardly.

Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

I don't exactly know what it means to be ready. A cake when the oven timer goes off? Am I fully baked, or only half-baked?

The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.