What am I most ashamed of in my life? Not keeping my promise to my sister and being too scared of America to attend her funeral.

You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can't go wrong. The world is behind you.

To realise our dreams we must decide to wake up.

I'm not intimidated by anyone. Everyone is made with two arms, two legs, a stomach and a head. Just think about that.

I shall dance all my life. . . . I would like to die, breathless, spent, at the end of a dance.

You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself. And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.

We must change the system of education and instruction. Unfortunately, history has shown us that brotherhood must be learned, when it should be natural.

The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains.

A violinist had a violin, a painter his palette. All I had was myself. I was the instrument that I must care for.

Let us stop saying 'white Americans' and 'colored Americans,' let us try once and for all saying... Americans. Let human beings be equal on Earth as in Heaven.

Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.

Gone - glimmering through the dream of things that were.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.

I love good rock'n'roll, blues and jazz, gospel, and a little reggae.

I don't want to sound too mystical or weird but it's important to know what garlic smells like when it's cooking, or what eggs look like when they're cracked out of a shell.

I definitely worked really hard to evoke Frankie Valli, but not do a strict imitation, because I feel that a strict imitation is not as compelling to watch.

The surest way to be late is to have plenty of time

Forgiveness is a gift to myself. I forgive, and I set myself free.

This is not to say that I wasn't completely repulsed. I mean, I wasn't exactly proud that my stepbrother was in there tongue wrestling with the second stupidest person in our class, after himself.

If I'm just in dungarees, I don't think I would intimidate anyone.

Every natural power exhilarates; a true talent delights the possessor first.