Now I'm having to live with sales of around 50 000 per album - but I'm pretty content with my place in the general scheme of things even if it's meant I don't drive a fancy car and can't afford grand vacations.

Well honey I had the million dollar houses I had the car I had the horse I had the barn I had everything. Was I set free? I didn't even know what that meant.

The year most of my high school friends and I got our driver's permits the coolest thing one could do was stand outside after school and twirl one's car keys like a lifeguard whistle. That jingling sound meant freedom and power.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

See what you're meant to do when you have a mid-life crisis is buy a fast car aren't you? Well I've always had fast cars. It's not that. It's the fear that you're past your best. It's the fear that the stuff you've done in the past is your best work.

I suddenly realized how much I loved her when we attended Alfred Hitchcock's 75th birthday party last August. There was something magical about that night and it made me see how much she really meant to me.

My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility about beauty and how to make gumbo.

Music as many people have said is the universal language. Of course points are made which make you think about things but ultimately it makes you feel. And that's why people remember more songs that have meant something during their life than films. They start to define periods in your life and that's kind of the beauty of it.

I learned the truth at seventeen That love was meant for beauty queens And high school girls with clear skinned smiles Who married young and then retired.

But the gravest difficulty and perhaps the most important in poetry meant solely for recitation is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty or rather of making verbal beauty tell.