It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom top or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.

I don't need anybody to market or promote me. If people don't want to hear this music then it's not for them. You cannot please everybody.

Music is a great energizer. It's a language everybody knows.

I've never missed a gig yet. Music makes people happy and that's why I go on doing it - I like to see everybody smile.

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.

A lot of movies aren't intended for everybody.

Everybody gets typecast in movies but you have to make wise choices. I'd say around 90 percent of movie casting is about the way you look so you have to fight that. If producers had their way I'd only be in action films but I'm interested in a more varied career than that.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane Chandler Jim Thompson and noir movies like Fuller Orson Welles Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I've managed to do movies and still keep a lifestyle where I can go to ballgames go to a grocery store like everybody else.

For a number of years I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be which is stupid.