“The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.”

“I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.”

“I don't care what a man is. I mean, a great artist is like a great doctor. I don't care how racist he is. If he can show me how to operate on a heart so that I can cure a brother, or cure someone else, I don't give a damn what the man thinks; he has taught me something. And that is valuable to me. And that is valuable to others and man as a whole. ”

“Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free. Yes, they must believe, they must believe. Because I know what it means to be a slave. I am a slave.”

“I like the sound of people's voices, and I think what a man says can very well tell what he's thinking, whether he's lying or not.”

“Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.”

“And that's all we are Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood. until we - each of us, individually- decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better. ”