Problems arise in that one has to find a balance between what people need from you and what you need for yourself.

I was given a stethoscope in a child's 'doctor's bag' at about age six and I loved it! One could hear the heart beating through that plastic toy.

Pigeon-holes are only comfortable for pigeons.

I am grateful that my horizons were not narrowed at the outset.

My arias make me take off as if I were on a trampoline.

It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.

There's no anger ever in a spiritual. There's always the dream of a hope of a better day coming. That God understands the troubles that I'm experiencing.

There has never been a time when I was not committed to, involved in, or caring of, the social and political issues of my world.

One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.

I want to sing more in Spanish. I want to sing the songs of Granados; the songs of Montsalvatge. To do things that truly I've not done before.

I walk an 11-minute mile without huffing and puffing.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.

If you find someone you love in your life, then hang on to that love.

It is possible for leaders or regimes to be cruel, bigoted, twisted in their world views and still make rational calculations with respect to their limits and their self-preservation.

If I were a bad black comic I would name my special, Yo mama, and other stories of a lack of self awareness.

I hate all jobs. I've never had a job I liked.

Each person feels pain in his own way, each has his own scars.

You listen to Handel operas, right? And there are a thousand of them, right? And they all sound alike. If I look back on my work, maybe it's the same thing.

One legged veterans will greet the dawn, and they're whistling marches as they mow the lawn, and the gargoyles on sit and grieve.

While this debate today is a belated effort to inform the American people, it is nevertheless an empty gesture. It is time to admit our mistake in Iraq and begin to bring our troops home with honor.