Is this how you repay my goodness--with badness?” cried the boy. “Of course,” said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. “That is the way of the world.

I am really quite proud of most of the people I " know who have "made it," who do things to help people.

We all suffer. If a man's wise, he learns from it.

The way to succeed is never quit. That's it. But really be humble about it. ... You start out lowly and humble and you carefully try to learn an accretion of little things that help you get there.

I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

Racism and hatred are synonymous.