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

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

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.

I've been in contact with music since I was four or five years old through my father, because of the interest he had in music and all his musical skills. I finally managed to make that my profession.

A sin confessed, a guilt cleared by grace.

Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?

Today, we have private airline companies, but if you take a look at a Boeing plane next time you travel, you'll see that you are basically taking a ride on a modified bomber.

I used to have a sort of spiky haircut and it just feels better to have short hair again.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

It's cool not growing old. I like being the eternal stud.

I think classic films are classic for a reason. It's always sketchy to redo one, especially if you're trying to make it contemporary. That's really just not the way to go.

Our job is to translate the lies, deceit, and anxiety that poisons our cultural water supply into an understandable form that we can digest.

Today let us all ask ourselves whether we are afraid of what God might ask, or of what he does ask.... Do I truly let God into my life? How do I answer him?

Machines can only find what ignorant men have programmed them to find.