We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors' wisdom.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

You can ask goodness in, show it how much you like it, make room for it. And it says, "Oh, I like this place, I think I'll stay here." Which is why people go into one house and say, "I want to take my shoes off." At another house, no matter how beautiful it is, they might say, "Hmm, I can't stay."

The music was my friend, my lover, my family.

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.

If you were the President of the United States or the Queen of England - you couldn't have a person who would be more protective than my mother was for me. Which meant really that I could dare to do all sorts of things.