Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‚Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.‘

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

It’s a very good question, very direct, and I’m not going to answer it.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

Disagreement is something normal.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam – those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that’s legitimate.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I’m animated.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I’ll give you an example; I don’t read what’s handed to me. People say, ‚Here, here’s your speech, or here’s an idea for a speech.‘ They’re changed. Trust me.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

I’m the most boring person to talk to.

I play a nobody in Japan.

Being a Puerto Rican artist, I support all kinds of projects that are developed on my beautiful island that in some way or another put our Puerto Rican flag up.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

Language is wine upon the lips.

My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.

If you want what you’re saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody’s life. Your own, first.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it’s funny. And it’s not funny. It’s not.

Britishness is just a way of putting things together and a certain don’t care attitude about clothes. You don’t care, you just do it and it looks great.

‚WASP‘ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Trash talk? Smack talk? This is an American term that makes me laugh. I simply speak the truth. I’m an Irish man.

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Most negotiators are trying to get their way.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.

Just talk to me as a father – not what the Constitution says. What do you feel?

The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.

The second time around, I’ll understand that, as a husband, my wife doesn’t care about my opinions. I just need to tell her the things that will continue to help me stack the brownie points.

I’m confident in who I am. I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.