Angel dust won't go away. Somefolks who were smoking it were going away.

Every once in a while, you live long enough to get the respect that people didn't want to give while you were trying to become a senior citizen.

I think a whole lot of stuff gets by people - I could name half a dozen groups that do songs that are openly supportive of experimentation with drugs, nobody ever said anything to them.

Music has the power to make me feel good like nothing else does. It gives me some peace for a while. Takes me back to who I really am.

Womenfolk raised me and I was full-grown before I knew I came from a broken home

You see Martin Luther King is dead and Huey Newton is not. And Malcolm X is dead and Bobby Seale is not. And Vernon Jordan was shot. The thing that revolutionaries, or even people who want to claim they're revolutionaries, often forget is that it doesn't make no difference what kind of wardrobe you wear, and if you speak up about Black people doing better you just risked your life.

I was a piano player before I was a poet.