Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I'd like to rephrase something I've already written.

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.

While you are going through your trial, you can recall your past victories and count the blessings that you do have with a sure hope of greater ones to allow if you are faithful.

Writing sharpens life

I thought then that you were the bravest girl I’d ever met, and nothing that’s happened since has changed my mind.

He shrugged, "...my conscience rests easiest if I do only what I see as best in the moment...

We should be a rich country again, and if we do that, we can leave Social Security.

If you're crazy enough to do what you love for a living, then you're bound to create a life that matters.

Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.

To know that one has never really tried - that is the only death

I'm so far gone that I'm telling the truth. It sounds like a foreign language.

An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.