Twenty-five years is a long time for a girl to live out of a trunk, and after looking over a few houses, I fell in love with one in Southwest Los Angeles.

Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.

Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

I am somebody cause God don't make no junk

Many people know how to criticize, but few know how to praise.

Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.

Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.

All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.

You can’t inspire and lead people without earning their attention. You achieve that in a counter-intuitive way – by paying close attention to what interests them.

His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

What shall I say? I must tread a fine line between glaciosity and friendlinosity. With just a hint of 'you don't know what you are missing, my fine-feathered friend.

A ssure you, the more I travel through time, the more I witness, the more I realize that there are things that are both strange and wonderful, far beyond human comprehension.

The ignorant are afraid to betray surprise or admiration...they think it ill manners.

Give me a scotch, I'm starving.

The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.

The film language is still in development and the traditional dialogue is the biggest problem because nobody knows how to interpret it in 3D world.