In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.

The extent of his influence across jazz, across American music, and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.

You must be willing to accept the fact that pain is a part of the process of revelation.

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