“When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.”

A song should have all the color and beauty of every rose.

My dream is to put together a performance of the evolution of black music with Cirque du Soleil . I would also like to do street opera and children’s books. But even as I work toward these things, I want to simplify my life.

My earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade.

The process is the most beautiful part.

I found this out over the years, that racism is a thinly veiled disguise over economics and money. It really is.

It’s the attitude about life, man. Looking at the light instead of the dark. Looking at love instead of fear.

Young people should travel, and they don’t. You can’t know if you don’t go.

All guys get into music because they love music and they also want to get the girls.

My grandmother had this high-tech security system – a rusty nail she used to lock the door.

The only music I don’t like is bad music.

I’m just a musician and a record producer.

A lot of the guys were like that – Oscar Pettiford – they just took me under their wing, and that’s why I automatically help young people. I just love it, because they did that for me.

Let’s not get too full of ourselves. Let’s leave space for God to come into the room.

The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.

Every day, my daddy told me the same thing. ‘Once a task is just begun, never leave it till it’s done. Be the labour great or small, do it well or not at all.’

I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.

God has proven himself as a faithful father. Now it falls to us to be trusting children.

My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty.

My father is an Algerian, proud of who he is and I am proud that my father is Algerian.

Being a husband is for me as big a priority as being a father.

People who say that only young people voted on the Internet, those who didn’t see Pele play, forget that children are not orphans. There’s always a father who buys the computer and perhaps influences their vote. I won the people’s vote.

I always ask my dad why wasn’t I a lefty? Even when I was younger I wanted to be lefty. I could have been really good.

Drummed into me, above all, by my dad, by the whole family, was that without your good name, you would be nothing.

I think naturally my orientation is from my father.