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.

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

To spin the tale with great flourish but never live the tale is the power of vision strangled to fiction by the fiction of fear.

Justice should be cheap but judges expensive.

What's cool about Twitter is that you can make a joke about something very of-the-moment or random that I wouldn't be able to joke about in stand-up.

I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

You cannot be born and you cannot die. You will exist in a universe that goes on forever. That is the ultimate horror from the Zen point of view. You could be unhappy forever.

We have seen Indians in immense numbers, and all those on this coast of the Pacific contrive to make a good subsistence on various seeds, and by fishing.

Chelsea Morning is a great Joni Mitchell song and I guess I'm partial to her lyrics because they show me a slightly different perspective on life.

One of the favorite games I play, when I improv or take on a character, is what I like to call arrogant ignorance. That's the game I enjoy playing most.

It does not matter if you believe in God, because God believes in you.

What you don't want to do is to hang on to the aging superstar past his prime and take resources away you can otherwise use to build a better overall team.