“If I know that I can do something that makes me happy, why do I allow myself to get so depressed?”

“I'm probably the only person in the world that feels physical pain as a reaction to joy.”

“I like lots of bands, and I LOVE fewer, but the list is still lengthy. I rarely pick a "favorite" because I think that's for laypeople who don't understand the infinite possibilities of music.”

“One Day you might desperately need to hear power chords and indulgent drum solos. Another might be a day for orchestral sounds. Picking one band above all else is just wrong. But, then again, it's ...”

“You never know. Somebody can seem cool and then you look in their music library and there's Katy Perry.”

“That's the problem with getting your heart wrapped up in things. The dumbest stuff starts to carry way too much significance. You think about things way too much. You imagine a hole being filled th...”

“There are two types of seeds in the mind: those that create anger, fear, frustration, jealousy, hatred and those that create love, compassion, equanimity and joy. Spirituality is germination and sp...”

“My music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me - the humiliation of it - as a soprano.These, by contrast, are...”

“If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you're allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.”

“I like how writing can take you off for a jaunt in your head and then set you back down in the chair where you've been all along.”

“Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs o...”

“The law is not an ass but a chameleon in ass skin: it turns deathly black when around blacks and pristine white when around whites”

“Maybe he wouldn't end up the kind of man who needed to use his body for work. Maybe he'd be a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind.”

“To be sure, I had, and have, spent the better part of my post-college life growing up in the public eye, with my shameful warts, big and ugly, looming there for the world to see; and it has been a ...”

“the black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.”