If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.