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

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.

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.

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.

The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.

I hated the quiet. I could hear my fears that much louder for it.

The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.

Do anything that you want to do other than what you are required to do...success will surely go to others.

I always love the soapy conflicts between somebody's family of origin and their new family - 'Do I have Thanksgiving at my husband's parents' house, or at my parents' house?'

My joke about Aaron Sorkin is that The West Wing was a great show about democracy, run by Kim Jong-Il!

Mouth in gear, brain stuck in neutral.

The stupid woman is the one who thinks she doesn’t need any help.

Whatever I think of, I dismember.

Mystery is the wine of this universe. It makes us dizzy and makes us feel happy! Man needs enigma so that he can get rid of the dullness of the reality!