Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.

Anybody under the age of forty knows hip-hop, gospel and R&ampB pretty well, and it's all a part of what we consider to be 'black music.' There is a natural synergy between the three.

John Legend

Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm.

Charles Caleb Colton

There is something sinister, something quite biographical about what I do - but that part is for me. It's my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance, melancholy. There's a sadness to it, but there's romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person.

Alexander McQueen

Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

W. Winwood Reade

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.

George Orwell

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

Toni Morrison

Every American deserves to live in freedom, to have his or her privacy respected and a chance to go as far as their ability and effort will take them - regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or economic circumstances.

Christopher Dodd

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

William Faulkner

I travel a lot. If you look at my suitcase, everything is extremely well-packed and well-folded people who travel with me are impressed at how organized I am. Some would refer to me as a maniac for this.

Joel Robuchon

More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man.

Woody Allen, My Speech to the Gr

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.

Paul Tillich

There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.

Rod Serling