“A solution to stop gang banging: SNOW!!”

The kids from the streets don’t want preaching or messages. They want what they can identify with. They want to hear about the reality of their situation, not fairy tales. They don’t care if it’s ugly; they just want reality.

Another murder I committed made the front page.

If you want to get your point across, you gotta cuss.

I have seven children by six different mothers. Maybe success was too good to me.

Movies don’t make people act a fool. People act a fool because they want to act a fool.

The boys in the hood are always hard.

I’m not a registered Republican or Democrat. I don’t even vote.

Get thee behind me Satan, and push me along. I’m kin to the devil.

What the cops did to Rodney King was wrong, and the officers who beat him should be sent straight to prison.

Nuthin’ can avoid this shot ’cause it’s hittin’ It’s so cool when you touch it, wear a mitten

I go to correctional facilities and talk to kids there. They have little kids in there who are, like, 12 years old, stealing cars and stuff like that.

It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in.

I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.

Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.

Every disease is a musical problem. Its cure a musical solution. The more rapid and complete the solution, the greater the musical talent of the doctor.

After a few decades, everyone you know will be dead. Problem solved.

Everything is a battlefield. If you fight with anger, you are part of the problem. If you fight with joy, you’re part of the solution.

Not everything that bothers us is a problem, not everything that comforts us is the solution.

Calmness will always produce solutions. No revolution ever began without a sharp exhale.