How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.
I don’t like to go to strange places.
My job is not done. I address my songs now to the third world. I am popular all over Asia and Africa and the Middle East, not to speak of South Africa, where I’m trying to go to see Nelson Mandela.
Desegregation is a joke.
I would like a man now who is rich, and who can give me a boat – a sailboat. I want to own it and let him pay for it. My first love is the sea and water, not music. Music is second.
I don’t like rap music at all. I don’t think it’s music. It’s just a beat and rapping.
I think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I’m not going.
From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.
Since I was three I’ve been playing the piano. I’ve been onstage. My mother is an Evangelist and I used to play the piano at her revival meetings.
I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.
I try to swim every damn day I can, and I’ve learned to scuba dive and snorkel.
It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution – real girl’s talk.
I am just one of the people who is sick of the social order, sick of the establishment, sick to my soul of it all. To me, America’s society is nothing but a cancer, and it must be exposed before it can be cured. I am not the doctor to cure it. All I can do is expose the sickness.
Having as little to do with human beings as possible – in some weird way, I’m at peace.
Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.
Cause your mama’s name was lonely, and your daddy’s name was pain. And they called you little sorrow, cus you’ll never love again. You ain’t got no one to hold you. You ain’t got no one to care. if you’d only understand it. nobody wants you anywhere.
I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why.
I came to expect despair every time I set foot in my own country, and I was never disappointed.
They don’t know that I’m dead, and my ghost is holding on.
You use up everything you’ve got trying to give everybody what they want.