Of course the folk guitar is the one I play very often, but I wanted a more electric sound.

We need self-confidence in our ability to build Africa. I trust in Mali and I trust in music.

You just have to try before thinking that you can't.

There are some things around us that are not actually useful. I didn't know that before. It's very new for me to understand. That became my way of writing: I can see also the new myself.

It's a great experience just to understand that finally being well known is not the most important thing.

The interesting thing for me is to put together all my influences and all my experiences I got through my traveling with my father.

When you are able to make a living with your job as an artist, that means you have an audience and you have to thank this audience.

Sometimes there are painters or very famous artists who start to become artists after they are dead because an audience or a public know about their art after they die.

When you have a chance to be an artist with an audience in your lifetime, you have to say thanks to your audience. That's a great thing. That's the best thing that can happen to an artist.

You can be a star here in Europe and not be known at all in the United States.

American audiences don't react in the same way as European ones to African music because, I think, Europeans listen to this music through all the festivals that exist here.

At this moment, I have nothing to do or ponder except love and wonder.

The people of the world have a fixed destiny. But the spiritually developed receive what is “not” in their destiny.

Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace.

At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.

Just write. It doesn't matter what you write. Just sit at your desk and write.

Male privilege and entitlement are dying a very painful death; no one gives up power without a struggle.

It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.

I know what's what, and have always taken care of the main chance.

The willingness to do creates the ability to do.

It seems with wit and good-nature, Utrum horum mavis accipe. Taste and good-nature are universally connected.