Without an audience, all your dreams will not come true at all, because you need an audience to write new songs and continue to do music.

We need self-confidence in our ability to build Africa. I trust in Mali and I trust in music.

You just have to try before thinking that you can't.

There are some things around us that are not actually useful. I didn't know that before. It's very new for me to understand. That became my way of writing: I can see also the new myself.

It's a great experience just to understand that finally being well known is not the most important thing.

The interesting thing for me is to put together all my influences and all my experiences I got through my traveling with my father.

When you are able to make a living with your job as an artist, that means you have an audience and you have to thank this audience.

Sometimes there are painters or very famous artists who start to become artists after they are dead because an audience or a public know about their art after they die.

When you have a chance to be an artist with an audience in your lifetime, you have to say thanks to your audience. That's a great thing. That's the best thing that can happen to an artist.

You can be a star here in Europe and not be known at all in the United States.

American audiences don't react in the same way as European ones to African music because, I think, Europeans listen to this music through all the festivals that exist here.

People who enroll themselves in the schools of pride, eventually graduate with and high degree of fall. Failure employs “prides” scholars. Get rusticated now!

I like my writing career and it's progression, I'd rather be that slow moving tide that turns a mountain into a beautiful beach for all to enjoy, rather than a flash in a pan that yields no heat.

I was hanging out and drinking as long as I could afford it, or as long as somebody else could afford it.

People often think that they are eating really healthy when all the food they are eating is genetically modified. So nothing genetically modified, only real food, grains, brown rice.

Nationalism is blamed for this century's wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty.

Do you wish to be free? Then above all things, love God, love your neighbor, love one another, love the common weal; then you will have true liberty.

Present suffering is not enjoyable, but life would be worth little without it. The difference between iron and steel is fire, but steel is worth all it costs.

Women are from their very infancy debarred those Advantages with the want of which they are afterwards reproached.

My first priority is my children. If at any moment I put aside something that I want to do to be a better parent than that is more than okay for me.

If a man lose his balance, and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cultivated man.