My father had a dairy farm. He employed three black families and one white family, and I used to play with black children.

Pakistan is not a unified country.

It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.

People from all over the world come to London wanting to make their own mark on it, and they add to the energy and vitality of the capital. It’s got a bit busier since the ’60s, but the more the merrier!

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You’re not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

I played with two lines of action figures when I was a kid: G.I. Joe and Star Wars.

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many ‚bads‘ – bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even ‚bad‘ white males. Only, when you write about ‚bad‘ white males, they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are ‚good‘ blacks, ‚good‘ homosexuals and ‚good‘ women?

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

The diversity of India, of our civilization, is actually a thing of beauty, which is something we are extremely proud of.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‚studies‘ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‚studies‘ are about propaganda rather than serious education.

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

I have dual citizenship; it just so happens I live in America. I would like to go back to Wales. I’m obsessed with my childhood, and at least three times a week dream I am back there.

I’m going to try to unite all Americans.

If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? We shouldn’t marginalise people for this. They must be integrated into society.

The voting booth joint is a great leveler; the whole neighborhood – rich, poor, old, young, decrepit and spunky – they all turn out in one day.

Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.

Today, Negroes play on every big league club and in every minor league. With millions of other Negroes in other walks of life, we are willing to stand up and be counted for what we believe in. In baseball or out, we are no longer willing to wait until Judgment Day for equality – we want it here on earth as well as in Heaven.

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Apple has given me a platform to spread music. They’re giving us Latinos a chance to shine.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

Our goal in the ’70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.

Whether a person is straight or gay, Republican, Democrat, good person, not a good person, they’re all welcome, because to me, church is a place you’re supposed to get healed and whole and loved.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

I can’t help the way you was born if you was gay.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

Today different ethnic groups and different nations come together due to common sense.

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

The fact is that I find more most men are more open, more generous, and much more stimulating than the majority of females I know.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

The things that transfixed you as a child, that you found most exciting was not a passing fancy, but a message about what you’re supposed to do.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.

It undoubtedly feels nice when you are being appreciated and you get complimented by girls. Who doesn’t like that? Having said that, I don’t take it as any pressure.

For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone’s inside virtually going everywhere they want to go, virtually having relationships, virtually traveling across the neighborhood, virtually going to that island.

I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.

I think it speaks of all women having those few special things that make them feel feminine. And so when I was a little girl, I would associate Guerlain with that.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

My mom was a great tennis player, and I remember being six or seven years old watching Steffi Graf and Monica Seles in Wimbledon in my house. I’ve always been a tennis fan.

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

When I was five – it’s not even bad – I stole a sweet from the sweet shop.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

My mom’s one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.