I am who I am. That’s why my friends and peers respect and appreciate me. I don’t change or cater my actions to fit my surroundings. I’m myself 24/7. People appreciate that.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

Our Creator expects His children everywhere to educate themselves.

Most of my young years were spent under the boots of the military.

I think I’m like most people – we fear the unknown and the things that have yet to come to pass, which are the very things that don’t deserve to be feared. When you give God complete control, it’s very hard not to be fearless.

I think the worst part about a breakup sometimes, if one could choose a worst part, would possibly be if you get out of a relationship, and you don’t recognize yourself because you changed a lot about you.

Anything I’ve ever said, I certainly was feeling at the time.

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

While musical experts of the world focus on what choir members can do, I would like to focus on what choir members can be.

The higher we are placed, the more humbly we should walk.

It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

I meant what I said and I said what I meant.

I’ve been reckless, but I’m not a rebel without a cause.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

What’s wrong with being a boring kind of guy?

When I was married, I definitely went through a lying period.

All that self-expression has just created a generation of morons, hooked on an endless appetite for rubbish.

Watch out for the joy-stealers: gossip, criticism, complaining, faultfinding, and a negative, judgmental attitude.

Individuals need to be willing to face truth about their attitudes, behaviors, even what we want out of life.

Self-worth comes from one thing – thinking that you are worthy.

You don’t have to give way to careless speech or complaining. You don’t have to let your feelings get in the way of what God wants to do in your life.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

I feel that I’ve done what I wanted to do, and that makes me feel fairly content.

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

I had a really good childhood up until I was nine, then a classic case of divorce really affected me.

Never complain. Never explain.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.

Don’t just let the devil use your mind as a garbage dump.

I didn’t think it was special to be able to sing.

You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they’re not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don’t care about money, and that’s not my problem.

I’ve had a few semi-toxic relationships, but it’s not what I look for when I’m seeing someone.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.

Vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.

You have to just make the choices you make in life. I made the choices I made because I believed they were right for me.

Don’t just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Some of the kids in school used to call my father a fake or a phony. That kind of thing brought on a few fights.

I really wanted to be a model when I was little. I loved photography, and I loved being on camera. But I was short and chubby, so I couldn’t. Anyway, being an artist is way more interesting than just being a model because it’s about you and what you want to be. You’re not being treated like a clothes hanger.

I’m crazy and I don’t pretend to be anything else.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

Billy Graham is one of my great lifetime heroes. I think he epitomizes the essence of what a Christian leader should be. I have participated in some of his crusades a couple of times in Atlanta. I’ve seen the profound impact he’s had on me personally, and on other people who were not Christians and accepted Christ as Savior.

We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do.

Never complain and never explain.

While children are struggling to be unique, the world around them is trying all means to make them look like everybody else.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

I used to get into a lot of fights.

What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it’s not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, ‚Hey, I can’t really figure those things out.‘

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn’t be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It’s a surprise to me that this hasn’t happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.

People don’t usually compliment your character.