Well a lot of politics is communicating with people and obviously comedy has something to do with that. I've been a producer and led people. Also being a comedian you're under pressure.

I look for the humanity in people however big the politics or oppressive the situation may be whether it's subsumed within a human being or between two human beings. I want to help us hold a mirror to ourselves.

I don't want to express my opinion about actual politics because if I do I have to be responsible for my decision.

What drew me to politics in the first place was the fact that I wanted to have a place to take a stand and use my voice to express what I believed in. But I've no longer got any political aspirations. I feel that as a politician fifty per cent of people would hate you before you even left the house.

As a black woman my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.

If a politician murders his mother the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

Since the printing press came into being poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots its business was to express the heroic saga the myths.

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.

A lyric it is true is the expression of personal emotion but then so is all poetry and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry differing from each other in essence is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.