I didn’t know any gay people in my childhood.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

Things won’t get better dwelling on the past. Accept what has happened. Then move forward.

We don’t need to share the same opinions as others, but we need to be respectful.

One day it will be over, and I don’t care.

Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.

All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn’t matter if you have a beautiful face or not.

I know I will never be happy, but I know I can be gay!

I like pin-up girls. I’m more of a boy than a girl. I’m not a lesbian, though – not before a sambuca anyway.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

Once you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

Here’s the thing: every office I’ve run for I was the first to win. First person of color. First woman. First woman of color. Every time.

Personally, I like reading adventures which really have happened to people, because they show what kind of things might happen to oneself, and they teach one how to ‚Be Prepared‘ to meet them.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It’s like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I’d like to play strong women who are also very feminine.

My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

I’m not focused on the gay and lesbian movement.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

I love making new friends and I respect people for a lot of different reasons.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

The American dream belongs to all of us.

Racism is real in this country.

Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.

I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.

When I was a child, I was very poor and wanted everything. So when I got money, I began buying things.

When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: ‚I never want to be alone.‘ That’s what I would say. I don’t want to be alone.

Sometimes, you might meet somebody that you love that’s turning into a ‚they.‘ My key is invite them to Miami and take them to the ocean and let them jump off the boat in the ocean, on the sand bar, and cleanse off and pray and then go take a shower, and hopefully the ‚they‘ is out of you.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

If I could have worked from the time I was born until I was 18 and never had to work again, I would have done it.

The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.

I refuse to allow any man-made differences to separate me from any other human beings.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

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

It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

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

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.

To like an individual because he’s black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn’t white.

There’s always going to be people who don’t understand or accept the united science, and I will just ignore them, as I’m only acting and communicating on the science.

I don’t just listen to rap.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

Now, as a nation, we don’t promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That’s an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.