"Being a musician is to live, not to survive. Surviving is going to work every day and giving up your liberty and your time. When you do music, it's a free life."

“You understand Teacher, don't you, that when you have a mother who's an angel and a father who is a cannibal king, and when you have sailed on the ocean all your whole life, then you don't know just how to behave in school with all the apples and ibexes.”

Source : Astrid Lindgren (1998). “Pippi Goes to School”

“People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.”

Source : "Campbell McGrath on Poetry, Walt Whitman and Schaefer Beer" by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, www.wsj.com. March 01, 2008.

“Given a blank we can’t help trying to fill it in along lines of customary seeing or saying. But the best poetic lines undermine those habits, break the pre- off the -dictable, unsettle the suburbs of your routine sentiments, and rattle the tracks of your trains of thoughts.”

“What the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe, plantation owners and law enforcement [officers] were doing to the African-Americans.”

“I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.”

“The reason I love my dog so much is because when I come home, he's the only one in the world who treats me like I'm the Beatles.”

“One thing I will never do as long as I’m at Georgia is lose to Florida.”

“All we want in this life is peace, prosperity and a little paper.”

Source : "Peace, Prosperity And Paper". Song by Kamaal Fareed (Q-Tip), Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Malik Taylor, October 25, 1996.