I guess if I’m a product, either you’re chocolate, you’re vanilla or you’re butterscotch. You can’t be all three.

An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.

I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

Life’s a rollercoaster. You’re up one minute; you’re down one minute. But who doesn’t like rollercoasters?

And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.

I don’t want to be called a point guard, but I can’t stop it.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.

My affection for Taiwan… is witnessed by everyone. My wife is Taiwanese and I am a son-in-law of Taiwan. I am half Taiwanese.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‚known for‘ is what I am.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

My son’s full real name is Duncan Zowie Haywood. As a toddler, he was called by his second name Zowie. But it was such an identifiable name during the Seventies that if I called him loudly in public places, everyone would turn to stare, so I started calling him Joey to take the pressure off.

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

You don’t go to Notre Dame to learn something; you go to Notre Dame to be somebody.

The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

I’d like to be known for more than being the guy in the big suit.

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.

I can simply tell you that since I was a kid, I didn’t like to look like anyone else.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

You know, I live a monastic lifestyle. No, I do. I do live in extremes, basically. I go back and forth. Once every six months, I’ll have a day where I eat more chocolate than has ever been consumed by a human being.

I feel Anglo-American.

I tell people, and it’s the truth, I could sit in my garage for a week and it won’t make me a car. And you can sit in church till your bottom is flat and that won’t make you a servant of Christ.

The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.

A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen.

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

People think I’m a celebrity. I’m not a celebrity.

You know, when you don’t go on TV and talk about how many women you sleep with, some people in Hollywood, that are supposedly ‚in the know,‘ start whispering that you’re gay. If I were gay, I wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it, but I’m not.

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

Woman’s at best a contradiction still.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.

Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, ‚black feminist‘ does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it’s just… womanish.