I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.
The majority of people in Angola were not provided with any kind of schooling and were completely illiterate, very badly paid, and treated almost as slaves.
Beck said he didn't believe in the theory of a song coming through you as if you were an open vessel. I agree with him to a certain extent.
A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.
If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.
For there is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands.
I would take plays and I would cut out all the other dialogue and make long monologues because I felt the other kids weren't taking it as seriously as I did.
Creole is New Orleans city food. Communities were created by the people who wanted to stay and not go back to Spain or France.
The vote, cast in a free atmosphere and with all inclinations and parties at present, was after all a vote to the Islamic Republic, to national independence, to the Constitution and to the Islamic causes.
Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.
No government is here forever. And there are other forces - the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business - doing good for the environment.
Some kinds of nails, such as those used for defending the soles of coarse shoes, called hobnails, require a particular form of the head, which is made by the stroke of a die.
When I feel a little confused, the only thing to do is to turn back to the study of nature before launching once again into the subjects closest to heart.
So I'm a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They're living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops.
Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
I never consciously said, 'I want to be an actor.' It sounds stupid, but it's kind of like being a painter or something. You don't say, 'From today on I'm going to be a painter.' It's not something conscious - you've just been painting pictures all your life.
People who get through life dependent on other people's possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count.
There were a lot of times I wondered if I was deluding myself. I had nothing else to fall back on, but I never enjoyed anything else.
Or if I have my head in the results, I can't work with what I have, because I'm trying to force something to happen. And with singing, any time you force it, you tighten up. If you tighten up, you're screwed, nothing will work.