I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts. I've never viewed them in any way as being separable.

Martin Luther King was a victim of surveillance, and had great solidarity with victims of surveillance.

Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop.

Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it's always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination.

We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.

And as a Christian, I got something the world didn't give me, the world can't take away, so I find joy that can never be reduced to anything.

The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.