Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.