If you are trying to impress a woman, leave any sort of show farting out of the equation.
I'd like to do something involving jazz. But books are how I earn my living, and I'd like to stay with the horse I rode in on.
God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.
I asked her if I was black or white. She replied "You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!
You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself.
Music and writing do fold together in the sense that you have to have a certain level of skill in order to execute your ideas and you need a medium. The idea of improvisation is one that many writers fall into, and I improvise a great deal when I'm writing, but there's a structural framework that I'm working around, and that takes more time than the actual writing. Once the characters get to yapping and talking, they'll move from one room to the next, and I just have to make sure that the house is built. That's really hard, that's the kind of thing that sits with you all day long.
There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.
I turn around from the window and for the first time I see him. . . It is Richard, smiling at my surprise. I run to him, without thinking what I am doing. I run to the first friendly face that I have seen since Christmas, and in a moment I am in his arms and he is holding me tightly and kissing my face, my closed eyes, my smiling mouth, kissing me till I am breathless and have to pull away from him.
There's no anger ever in a spiritual. There's always the dream of a hope of a better day coming. That God understands the troubles that I'm experiencing.
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except the nuts. It's enough to get you down.