We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists... in the loved one, perfection.

Living consciously involves being genuine; it involves listening and responding to others honestly and openly; it involves being in the moment.

You don't have to become something you're not to be better than you were.

To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed.

I never had an occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was... a human being.

I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.

A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better.

I do know that I'm responsible not for what happens, but for what I make of it.

I am the me I choose to be.

You don't have to become something that you aren't to become better than you are.

I set my star so high that I would constantly be in motion toward it.

he lived in London indeed but invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch

Black music has increased my enjoyment of what I do. It has increased my range, my ability to reach into myself and accept myself.

I don't really know what inspires me to write the music I do, but usually, the music will set the tone for the lyrics.

......And she's courageous but scared to death But that's what courage means

Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.

The conservative movement today is so fractured that I think you'd have a tough time actually defining it and pointing to it.

If you want to understand what a watermelon is, you take a watermelon, get a knife, and cut the watermelon. Then you put a slice in your mouth. Boom! YOUR experience!

Making music, being creative in some primal way, should be fun. Listening to it or playing it can and should take you out of yourself for some brief blissful moments.

People will buy anything that is one to a customer.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.