"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask."

"Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws."

"If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."

"Love cannot save you from your own fate."

"Can art change the world? Maybe... we should change the question: Can art change people's lives?"

"Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard."

"Honestly, I don't listen to nobody else's music but my own. It's kind of like sports to me. You don't see Kobe Bryant at a LeBron James game - he just works on his own game. And that's what I do. I only listen to me, so I can criticize and analyze and all those things."

"Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work."