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

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.

Rhythm and melody enter into the soul of the well-instructed youth and produce there a certain mental harmony hardly obtainable in any other way. ... thus music, too, is concerned with the principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm.

It is not sex by itself that interests me, but its particular role in American consciousness, and in my own life.

'Saturday Night Live' was actually started with a show that Lorne Michaels and I did at a summer camp called Timberlane in Ontario when we were 14 and 15. We would do an improvisational show with music, comedy and acting.

Her voice was warm and husky as a clarinet but not so sad as a clarinet friendlier. When she laughed it was like a clarinet blowing bubbles.

That said, let me add that Joan and I never want him to be a child actor. We both feel that it takes away their childhood and puts untold pressure on children.

Jesus is a personal symbol of the Holy Spirit. Having been totally healed by the Holy Spirit, Jesus became one with him. Every thought, action, and deed of Jesus was guided by the Holy Spirit instead of ego.

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Management has to be where the action is.

I've tried to bring the mentality of the outside linebacker to the inside and the rough, tough style of an inside linebacker to the outside. The middle linebacker always has been known as kind of a big plugger. Outside guys are known to be able to run. I just try to make big plays wherever I am.

When the music changes, so does the dance.

Any father likes his son to take over from him if possible.

My dad was a musician who went to Berklee, and he made me learn piano when I was five.

Give a lot, expect a lot, and if you don't get it, prune.

Customers are very demanding and well informed.

The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.

When a great artist gets my attention, I pursue it. If I don't, someone else will, you know what I'm saying?

When you look at the actual numbers, the number of people who died after 9/11 was greater than the number of people who died in 9/11, even if you are talking Americans. But you know, I don't like to talk Americans. I want to talk everybody. More innocent people died after 9/11 because of 9/11 than died in 9/11.