You have to practice for a long time before you can learn to sound like yourself

Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

If you sacrifice your art because of some woman, or some man, or for some color, or for some wealth, you can't be trusted.

Comforts and syphilis are the greatest enemies of mankind.

I'm a physical receiver, yet I can run and move like someone who is 5-8 or 5-9.

Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would we exalt the one by depreciating the other.

I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

I see people - they won't be negative toward other people, but inside they're negative toward themselves, and I think that holds us back.

Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.

It was a great circumstance when I received the script of [Chloe] and Atom [Egoyan] said he wanted me to do it. I was inclined to say 'yes' immediately.

To be happy is very important to do a great performance because you have to be comfortable; your mind has to be clear.

I don’t see a way in,” Eve whispered. Why are you whispering?” Myrnin whispered back. “Vampires can hear us, anyway.

We must learn to give ourselves permission to blunder, to fail, and to make fools of ourselves every day for the rest of our lives. We do so in any case.