“The trick is to have a career and have a family. It’s like having two dogs that hate each other and you have to take them for a walk every night.”

People get frightened that success is going to take them out of life. They’re no longer going to be on the corner of Bedlam and Squalor; life will only be something you can get through the mail.

There’s no prayer like desire.

Oh, I’m not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.

The beginning of it starts at the end.

Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, it’s just god when he’s drunk.

You got to tell me the brave captain Why are the wicked so strong? How do the angels get to sleep When the devil leaves the porch light on?

I’ve lost my equilibrium, my car keys, and my pride.

I’ve seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train.

You’re my North Star when I’m lost and feeling blue.

I don’t like the stigma that comes with being called a poet. So I call what I’m doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue.

Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late. Tell ’em to do that, they’ll find a little pot of gold.

Sing me a rainbow. Steal me a dream.

I don’t go to church on Sunday, don’t get on my knees to pray, or memorize the books of the Bible, I got my own special way

On my gravestone, I want it to say, “I told you I was sick.”

The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.

I was always laughing in church.

If I use the media, even with tricks, to publicize a black youth being shot in the back in Teaneck, New Jersey.

I had my moment on the stage. The trick in life is to know when to leave.

As television is learning some of the movies’ great tricks, movies are taking what’s good from TV.

Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.

But self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of collapsing when full blown, and facts are stony things that refuse to melt away in the sunshine of a smile.

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.

The trick is, as I know it, is to care like hell and not give a damn at the same time.

Putting two songs together, I’ve always loved that trick when it works.