Quotes

A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.

In actual life, every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.

I dropped out of school, but I didn't drop out of life. I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world... I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.

From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.

I try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures.

If you want to participate in life, you have to deny your identity.

I write for myself, and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there.

The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

Everything is so unstable in these times of progress at any cost, and social customs and methods of life alter so rapidly, that a few years now suffice to change completely the face of usages which, at their inception, bade fair to outlive the age - so enthusiastically were they welcomed by the public.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

But my favorite band is Curbside Life, out of Chicago.

Because I've lived in one room my entire life, working at the same table that you use to pay bills at and eat at. It's going to be nice to have actual space.

Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life.

Ninety-nine percent of the things that seem weird in my life can be answered with my religion. Paganism is mostly about nature-worship. It's about being in harmony with your environment and bringing the world of spirit and world of man together. It's about balance.

I credit my singing to my mom because she didn't give me a binky when I was a baby. I cried and screamed for the first six months - my mom would say four years of my life - and I developed wonderful lungs.

My mother always said to carry yourself with dignity and pride, and I just think Audrey Hepburn totally epitomizes that, you know? From such a young age, she was dancing ballet. There was a lot going on in her life... that was during the time of the Nazis.

The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations.

At this age, I should be leading a quiet life.

The people have given me their support; they have given me their trust and confidence. My colleagues have suffered a lot in order to give me support. I do not look upon my life as a sacrifice at all.

Every role is a potential lover. I ask: Are they someone I want to wake up to in the morning and go to bed with at night? Do they question my assumptions about life? Consume me to distraction? Make my cry, then clown to make me laugh again? If I say yes, then it's all I need.

Luckily for me, people don't scream at me that much in my everyday life.

I don't know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate - it feels like I'm singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

This recession is the deepest in our lifetimes, the deepest since 1929. If you take the people thrown out of work in the 1982 recession, the 1991 recession, the 2001 recession, not only is this bigger, this is bigger than all of those combined.

There were 14,000 people at the rally for the president in Ohio. There were another 8,000 people in Virginia. If all 22,000 of those people opened their wallets and gave $1,000 each, that would be less than one donation from a billionaire to the super PACs. And that's why he's in for the fight of his life.