If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

People who are given whatever they want soon develop a sense of entitlement and rapidly lose their sense of proportion.

Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.

Facts might be false if they challenge the conviction of a mind already made up.

Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.

History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always solid things.

There is nothing that 'Sesame Street' can't teach you, if you let it.

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.

Wait, ” Quinn said. “There’s one more thing.” I turned around and raised an eyebrow. His eyes were wary and he lacked his usual confidence.“Go to the Winter Dance with me.

We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know.

We were so poor; the ultimate luxury in our house at the time was ashtrays without advertisements.

My first hero, as a teenager, was James Connolly. I remember discovering that he was a feminist, and that was an eye-opener, coming from a man of such poverty.

In the end all books are written for your friends.

What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.

You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.

Being a human being without forgiveness is like being a guitarist without fingers or being the diva without a tongue.

It's easy to solve a problem that everyone sees, but it's hard to solve a problem that almost no one sees.

I'm going to quit music. Then the government of Japan asked me to write a piano concerto - that was an offer I couldn't refuse, so that brought me back to music again.