I'm still learning every night, with every opportunity to write something, to sing something, to perform any work. Every opportunity to do these things brings me further along the journey, and the best part is, no matter how far along I go, I have so much more to learn.

Economics really pervert every possible good thing that comes, whether it's food or a cure or a new technological advancement; anything like that is always stopped by who has access to it.

I've written a couple raps in my day, in my own music career, that people don't know a lot about.

It's a trippy and really magical experience when people like Michelle Obama are looking at you saying, 'Great job,' when all you want to do is say, 'Great job,' to the First Lady of our country.

When you're young and you have money, you become the CEO, automatically, of life, of your family.

You can't have a happy family if you don't have a happy marriage.

Literary men now routinely tell their readers about their divorces. One literary man who reviews books wrote, in reviewing a study of Ruskin, that he had never read a book by Ruskin but that the study confirmed him in his belief that he didn't want to read a book by Ruskin. This man very often writes about his family life.

I grew up with music in the house. I was told I could sing as soon as I started talking. Everybody in my family sang, always lots of records, blues and jazz and soul, R&B, you know, like Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Coltrane, that kind of thing.