The artist has to be exactly the opposite [of people singing the song, I've gotta be Me,] and transcend himself as he makes judgements.

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.

Art is the soul of a people.

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us...There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others.

Painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel.

virtue does not spring from riches, but riches and all other human blessings, both private and public, from virtue.

If you are not a part of the solution then you must be part of the problem. I am done with problems here!

Men are going to go out on the road and they're going to find other women. So if you really want to save yourself a whole lot of heartache, do not fall in love with somebody in a band. Just don't.

Making a movie is, for me, like painting. I just enjoy the care that goes into every brushstroke and the choice of every color. I enjoy the intensity of it.

If we're for one another, we're feminists. The rest is semantics.

Taste may be compared to that exquisite sense of the bee, which instantly discovers and extracts the quintessence of every flower, and disregards all the rest of it.

I have to come first, because then everyone benefits.

I’m a serious-minded and intense little devil – terribly gauche and so tense that I don’t see how people can stay in the same room as me. I know I couldn’t tolerate myself.

I can't belong to groups. I've tried. I behave normally, but people don't look at me normally.

But above that, most mature adults can hold their attention on something for 45 minutes, whether they like it or not. But above that requires training.