I have excessive energy, tremendous energy. I have a sense of people. I can feel them, pretty much so, in a short time. I'm not afraid of death. I'm just not afraid of anything.

There's great poetry in the Old Testament and the New Testament. And I'm not interested in trying to prove whether this paragraph is as it was or as it should have been or should not be. My pursuit is to find the truth for me in those stories and make them apropos. The important thing is that people wrote them. These were inspirational stories, and you got to see them that way. If you don't, you'll get in trouble. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to find out whether or not Mary was a virgin. What do I care about Mary being a virgin?

I am noticing that we're getting more and more people - and I don't know how to handle this - who come to me saying, "Would you pray for my son? Would you pray for my daughter?" I've been saying, "Pray for them yourself." But they don't want that because they think I've got something that's greater than what they have. I keep saying, "I don't! Not really. I got the title 'minister; but I don't want to exploit you. You do it, too." I think the way to solve it is to do it together. We're going to pray in community, you see?

I have excessive energy, tremendous energy. I have a sense of people. I can feel them, pretty much so, in a short time. I'm not afraid of death. I'm just not afraid of anything.

I was the fifth child in a family of six, five boys and one girl. Bless that poor girl. We were very poor; it was the 30s. We survived off of the food and the little work that my father could get working on the roads or whatever the WPA provided. We were always in line to get food. The survival of our family really depended on the survival of the other black families in that community. We had that village aspect about us, that African sense about us. We always shared what we had with each other. We were able to make it because there was really a total family, a village.

When people get up on the stage and say, "I've got AIDS," or "I'm in recovery," gosh, it's hard for them. It's like that story touches every person's story. You know, they open their entire humanity up. Storytelling is very important in life. Telling the truth is critical. It's like, again, the melody. The melody of jazz music is the truth, for me.

I don't go and study other folks. I come from where I came from, as a kid, in the little black church I grew up in. And some of the things they did I rejected, because I could see that it was a manipulation and an exaggeration. My struggle is never to fool folks; to keep it authentic - who we are and who we are becoming - rather than to mimic or to translate what others do into my own terms.