I learned to hear silence. That's the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters.

We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.

I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.

I have a kind of respect - a worshipful attitude, even - for nature and the natural order and the cosmos and the seasons.

We suffer pain, we hang tight to hope, we nurture expectations, we are plagued occasionally by fears, we are haunted by defeats and unrealized hopes . . . The hoplessness of which I speak is not limited.

If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. You simply won't.

Accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.