Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

The next parent who Googles Is my 2-year-old gifted? should get a curt response: Your 2-year-old is a gift.

I teach metaphysics and pastor a church.

Silences can be as different as sounds.

I feel like I have a bowling ball sitting on my hoo-ha.

Is he all right?" Jade asked Sterns. He Swooned" I know he swooned," Jade replied.

I live in constant fear of being fired or dropped for that dark part of my work I can't control.

... every entity loses perfection as long as it is not fulfilling its purpose.

A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights. Men are moved by only two mechanisms: fear and self-interest. Victory belongs to the most persevering.

That is the ultimate synthesis - when Zorba becomes a Buddha. I am trying to create here not Zorba the Greek but Zorba the Buddha.

James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.