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.

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.

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.

I've been in contact with music since I was four or five years old through my father, because of the interest he had in music and all his musical skills. I finally managed to make that my profession.

Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.

I'd gladly stop working if someone can prove that stupid chatter will maake my day.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

I have a garden in my backyard that's completely organic, which I'm very proud of.

Along with the 97 percent of women who can see, I have never been a fan of redheaded men.

Sacrifices are not in vain. At the end, everything will pay off.

An untrained or uneducated Marine ... deployed to the combat zone is a bigger threat to mission accomplishment ... than the enemy.

If I have anything to offer as an actor, it's only my ability to make the person real.

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.