Probably the only thing my mom and dad agreed on was the vital importance of guilt.

If life can end in one minute - so damn quickly with no damn warning - you better do what you want to do now right this minute. Because your next minute might not happen.

Singers come and go; the music business waxes and wanes. The blues are popular and unpopular, often at the same time.

I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

Marcia was incredibly organized, obsessively neat ... I mean she folded her underwear like origami.

Yiddish is the voice of exile, the tongue of ghettos, but I'll shed a tear when it joins ancient Greek and dead Latin. For gossip and insult, you can't beat Yiddish.

Guilt is the major motivating force in my life.

Record company execs eat their young, I swear to God.

I have no-fail chemistry. A guy turns me on, he's the wrong one for me.

Make your heart your heaven.

Accepting others through kindness and love defines a person's true character.

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

Artists, no matter how good their intentions, are always slower than they think.

We're all Africans, everyone - black, white, yellow.

There comes a point at which a law can be so unjust it is necessary openly, lovingly and with a willingness to accept the consequences to refuse to comply with a greatly unjust law.

Believe that others are better than you in the debths of their soul, although outwardly you may appear better than they.

Wondering why we bother with love, if it never lasts.

With living colours give my verse to glow: The sad memorial of a tale of woe!