“Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.”

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.

When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.

I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.

Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

Writing is a delicious agony.

Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

The music is in minors.

No man can give me any word but Wait.

We don’t ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you’re telling them that they’re less than somebody else.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

Don’t let anyone call you a minority if you’re black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You’re not less than anybody else.

A performer learns with experience and with age. I did not know the future when I left home and started out to begin my career: I started qawaali; then I met Peter Gabriel and was exposed to a lot of new ideas.

The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

The beginning is the promise of the end.

People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.

As warmth makes even glaciers trickle, and opens streams in the ribs of frozen mountains, so the heart knows the full flow and life of its grief only when it begins to melt and pass away.

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. I’m beginning to believe it.

I think there’s a percentage that don’t realize, that don’t know that [standup] is how everything began. We planned it, we work hard, rehearsals to get this. It’s more of a it’s not just coming in there in a T-shirt and holding a microphone.