Gil Scott-Heron

You see, revolution sounds like something that happens, like turning on the light switch, but actually it's moving a large obstacle, and a lot of folks' efforts to push it in one direction or the other have to combine.

Well, I grew up on the blues, man!

Music has the power to make me feel good like nothing else does. It gives me some peace for a while. Takes me back to who I really am.

I've always had questions about what it meant to be a protester, to be in the minority. Are the people who are trying to find peace, who are trying to have the Constitution apply to everybody, are they really the radicals? We're not protesting from the outside. We're inside.

Everything that's bad for you catches on too quickly in America, because that's the easiest thing to get people to invest in, the pursuits that are easy and destructive, the ones that bring out the least positive aspects of people.

I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.

I have a novel that I can write. It's about three soldiers from Somalia. Some babies have been disappearing up on 144th Street, and I speculate later on what happened to them and how they might have been got back. These guys are dead, all three, and they have a chance in the afterlife to do something they should have done when they were alive.

The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people's faces, because that's the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about.

I thought that some of my best records was when there wasn't a lot of work being done on it, like 'Winter in America' and 'Secrets' and when there weren't a whole lot of people in the studios.

I was born in Chicago, but I was raised in a town called Jackson, Tennessee. And a lot of these changes that were necessary and talked about it as important have been made, like, people go to school where they want to go. They work for equal pay, they work for - they can go school and have an equal shot at a job.

I tour more than I need to, more than is good for you. But it's my favorite part of music. I much prefer it to studio work.

Schedule? I have no schedule. There is no hurry. I work when I want to.