Unfortunately, I'm not a person that's always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy.

You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

Like Petrach's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.

Patience is the companion of wisdom.

You're blowing it, son! You're blowing it!

I'm not the government. Nor would I EVER want to be the government - I don't know how you feel about government, but I'm not really happy about them.

For a while, I couldn't decide whether or not I should pursue singing in the opera or acting. And I'm glad that I chose the latter because I wasn't a very good singer.

Love is such a confusing word. You think I'm joking but I'm not.

I definitely would rather take a nap than get angry.

Computer modelling for weather forecasting, and indeed for climate forecasting, has reached its limits.

A five-year old is in a pretty good position to assess who is beautiful and who is not. Removed from the confusions of sexuality, he or she can judge a face as a face.

Say, what abridgement have you for this evening? What masque, what music? How shall we beguile The lazy time if not with some delight?