I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.

Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.

The perpetrators of the actual bad stuff that does real and lasting harm to people, like leakage of industrial chemicals into water systems, seem to get not so much as a second glance; the bloviation from media pundits and think tanks creates false problems that waste time and energy debunking.

There's a lot of mountain climbers trapped inside of bodies of people behind the counter at Kinko's.

We Americans are hard on almost everything. We are hard on our vehicles, our marriages and our heroes. Mostly, however, we are hard on ourselves.

We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP.

The talking shows are like free jazz. I'm just gonna go out there and blow with the idea of keeping it streamlined and not wasting time. It's wild. And it's a great thing when you see a performer really able to.