Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.

One isn't born with courage. One develops it by doing small courageous things.

The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.

Poetry and music are the best at the highest level of the human mind. Out of poetry, out of their need for poetry, human beings have developed the idea of God. And so when we sing, when we dance, when we speak poetry we are speaking out of God's mouth, each other out of the music from God's heart.

I believe that a negative statement is poison.I'm convinced that the negative has power. It lives. And if you allow it to perch in your house, in your mind, in your life, it can take you over. So when the rude or cruel thing is said - the lambasting, the gay bashing, the hate - I say, "Take it all out of my house!" Those negative words climb into the woodwork and into the furniture, and the next thing you know they'll be on my skin.

Being free is being able to accept people for what they are, and not try to understand all they are or be what they are.

You know, I never trust people who don't laugh, who said, "I am serious" and act as if they put airplane glue on the back of their hands and stuck the glue to their foreheads. I think, "You're not serious; you're boring as hell."