I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.

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.

I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.

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.

The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

Our democratic richness arrives when we're able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately.

People don't really think other people are the same.

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.

Unfortunately, I'm not a person that's always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

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

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

Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I'd like to rephrase something I've already written.

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.

Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.

Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don't know what's going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that's not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.

Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.

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.

Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.

I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.

The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.

If it weren't for women, men would still be wearing last week's socks.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

To a smart girl men are no problem - they're the answer.

We should have a State in which we could live and breathe as free men and which we could develop according to our own lights and culture and where principles of Islamic social justice could find free play.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Athletes as role models and heroes is a hoax, a sick hoax. The men and women who are fighting in Iraq, they are the true heroes.

Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

There is always a type of man who says he loves his fellow men, and expects to make a living at it.

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.