Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

A few weeks before the jubilee began in 2002, Queen Elizabeth died, and the public outpouring of grief and affection, with hundreds of thousands of people queuing for hours to pass by her coffin, showed how widely and deeply loved she was.

So much music in Africa was created for specific moments, written for rituals or for a funeral or for challenges, thousands of years ago, and these rhythms are still used.

Patrick Henry did not say, 'Give me absolutely safety or give me death.' America is supposed to be about freedom.

A weird side effect of being in close proximity to death is an urgency.