When I was 27 years old I organized legal aid clinics to help low-income seniors. It was a life-altering experience.

I started off on stage because it was the only work I could get. I haven't been back for 11 years. I think any stage experience is good experience as far as being an actor is concerned.

Through the years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot but it can't access the hidden places.

So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see - you know if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one which it wasn't in - 21 years ago then I'd think well you know maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on.

When I was 12 years old someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience because words make experience last.

I sought my father in the world of the black musician because it contained wisdom experience sadness and loneliness. I was not ever interested in the music of boys. From my youngest years I was interested in the music of men.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common of thinking by the body of the people so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.