What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.

The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value.

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.

If you're going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit.

You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.