Gil Scott-Heron

“You should be able to do anything you can afford as an adult.”

“Well, I grew up on the blues, man!”

“Womenfolk raised me, and I was full-grown before I knew I came from a broken home.”

“I have a novel that I can write. It's about three soldiers from Somalia. Some babies have been disappearing up on 144th Street, and I speculate later on what happened to them and how they might have been got back. These guys are dead, all three, and they have a chance in the afterlife to do something they should have done when they were alive.”

“I was one of the first three black students to go to an all-white school in Tennessee.”

“I cannot afford to watch Fox News.”

“If you aren't having no fun, die, because you're running a worthless program, far as I'm concerned.”

“Music has the power to make me feel good like nothing else does. It gives me some peace for a while. Takes me back to who I really am.”

“I was a piano player before I was a poet.”

“Every once in a while, you live long enough to get the respect that people didn't want to give while you were trying to become a senior citizen.”

“I've always had questions about what it meant to be a protester, to be in the minority. Are the people who are trying to find peace, who are trying to have the Constitution apply to everybody, are they really the radicals? We're not protesting from the outside. We're inside.”

“You have to learn and keep learning.”

“If you're supposed to be doing something, the spirits will come and help you. They have helped me out with lines I shouldn't have known, chords I shouldn't have known. Every once in a while I get lines from somewhere, and I think, I better write this down.”

“The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people's faces, because that's the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about.”

“Your life has to consist of more than 'Black people should unite.' You hope they do, but not twenty-four hours a day.”