Music is the center of my life.

You've got to learn to leave the table When love's no longer being served".

I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.

What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.

You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.

Life is short. People are not easy to know. They're not easy to know, so if you don't tell them how you feel, you're not going to get anywhere, I feel.

You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.

Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it

There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost? Everything!

A scientist is only a human being, a particle in the whole universe. How can the observations and logic of a particle measure the life and size of a phenomenon that is limitless?

Always a godmother, never a mother. That sucks. I've got to get me one of those little accessories.

Even the klan revamped their image by losing the hoods and changing their name to the Tea Party.

Little I ask And that little is not granted." There are few crumbs In this world any more.

The struggle to make an absolute statement in an individually conceived vocabulary accounts for the profound tensions inherent in the best modern work.

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

People make a big fuss over you when you're President. But I'm very serious about doing everything I can to make sure that it doesn't go to my head.

I think that plain old intellectualism [can be] a more powerful force than the idea of the femme fatale.

Women had no clerical role anywhere in the Western world, period.