All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

Age does take it out of you, and I haven't the energy I had before. Sometimes I have breakfast and sit in this chair, and I wake up and it is lunchtime. In the past, the idea of sleeping through a morning would have horrified me, but you have to accept the limitations that old age imposes on you.

I've been a member of the Labour Party sixty five years, and I remain in it, but I think it's all about campaigning for justice and peace, and if you do that, you get a lot of support.

If you file your waste-paper basket for fifty years, you have a public library.

As a teenager, my blackness was also questioned by some of the life choices I made that weren't considered to be 'black' choices. For example, joining the swim team when it is a known fact that 'black folk don't swim'; or choosing to become a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken.

Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

I learned that the songs that mean the most to me are the songs that I write by myself. While there were people I wrote really well with, particularly Gary Nicholson and Delbert McClinton, and I really enjoyed the experience, I came away from it feeling like I need to write by myself.