“Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.”

“The only things I had to look forward to in life was a job and a career and a family and just going through the whole cycle. It just seemed like what everybody else was doing. And I looked at people around me. I looked at the people that taught the schools and around the government, and I looked at the type of work that my father did, and none of it really interested me that much. And when I first took psychedelics, I felt like I was admitted into a world of compassion and beauty and creativity. It was like nothing I had experienced in my regular life. And almost instantly that became the goal of where I wanted to be…”

“People don't do them around me. I would never allow it. The people who are around me are people that I love, and I don't want to see people that I love hurt themselves.”

“I look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through.
Looking into their eyes I see them running too.”

“I'm not looking back, but I want to look around me now.
-- Time Stand Still (1987)”

“And my parents made me want i am. So what? We get stuff from our parents, but we also get stuff from the world around us. From people around us. And at the end of the day, we're us.”

“Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home, from my childhood, are still with me. And now, when I look at the system here and look at my position--not just as a basketball player, but when I look around me at the values of the people and the culture and compare them with the values of where I came from--I feel so blessed to be from Africa.”

“I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again…”

“Music to me is the air I breathe it's the blood that pumps through my veins that keeps me alive”

“Every seven years or so I look around me and I want to look at the society and I want to try and be everyone I'm seeing in the world right now. […] And I've done this all my life. I realized I used to do this in my mother's bedroom when I was 6. I used to be everyone in my village and everyone at school and everyone in the news, and I'm still doing that same show. I'm now 56. I think I can do it in my 80s. I'll just, you know, impersonate everyone around me then in the nursing home.”