Lincoln was less well-read than many a professor or journalist, but what he read, he read deeply.

A storyteller, a displaced poet, will absorb reading differently.

Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.

The towering genius is not apolitical.

He might not take their advice, but he took their temperature.

Lincoln was a master of small group theatrics.

To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.

Lincoln told a family friend that his father taught him to work, but never learned him to love it.

Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness.

God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.

She became at once more intimate and more exalted.

She inhaled a worry. She exhaled a prayer." Mary Lou Quinlan, author

It's not what you eat that will kill you as much as what is eating you.

A lot of vets like 'Good Morning Vietnam' - I get great letters from guys.

I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.

I want to be the best role model I can be for my family.

I don't know if I even consider myself a comedian really - I do comedic acting in some films and dramatic in others.

I really went back through a lot of the dark corridors of my life in this. I wanted people to know who I am based on my music, not on what they read in the tabloids.

Education is the key to unlocking the world, a passport to freedom.