If you catch me saying 'I am a serious actor', I beg you to slap me.
I think there's more women that watch me than men, but I don't look at myself as just a minister to women. My ministry began that way, but I really feel like the Word of God is for everybody.
Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
God did not want me to be a blind beggar on the street, alone and bitter. He gave me music, first to be my companion and then to be my salvation.
I was very sensitive to the environment around, and this disparity in people, seeing beggars and laborers not paid well, used to disturb me. So these emotions in these roles came very naturally to me.
Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging.
I've always found the rhetoric of mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations to be far too timid, accommodationist, and gradualist. It always seemed to me that they behaved like meek and gentle supplicants begging the oppressor for a few crumbs of justice, for a few molecules of citizenship rights.
A friend of mine, a Hispanic entrepreneur asked me a question sometime ago, he said, 'When is the last time you saw a Hispanic panhandler?' I think it's a great question. I'll tell you, in my life I've never once have seen a Hispanic panhandler, because in our community, it would be viewed as shameful to be out on the street begging.
People generally let me be me. People are aware that I'm not someone particularly begging for attention. They hold back a bit with me.
Getting a beginner publishing deal really helped me gain the skills. I just kept writing and writing. You just take everything out of life and turn it into an idea or a melody or a song and find the best writers you can to write with that fit you and know what you want to do.
I am just a beginner. The two films so far are baby steps. If I develop an attitude, I'll be finished even before I've started. Besides, if I started misbehaving, my folks would give me a tight slap.
It's a win-win situation when you make your debut with a superstar like Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, or Sunny Deol. The audience walks in to watch the actors they idolise; they also end up noticing beginners like me.
Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.
Wu-Tang was going through it. They didn't come from great homes or families. They really came from hard beginnings so it just made me reflect on my own situation. If Wu-Tang was able to make it, why can't I?
If I could change anything, I would definitely have had a father around. My father. I would definitely say it affected me deeply as a young man, coming up. Who doesn't want a father? Those are the beginnings, and those are what can dictate the roads you choose in life, and choosing them well.
The UK has no input in Afrobeat. Let me make myself very clear. The UK has no influence in the creation or naming or anything that has to do with Afrobeat' roots or beginnings.
I am that prodigal son who wasted all the portion entrusted to me by my father. But I have not yet fallen at my father's knees. I have not yet begun to put away from me the enticements of my former riotous living.
While Mayor Daley surprised me today with his decision to not run for reelection, I have never been surprised by his leadership, dedication and tireless work on behalf of the city and the people of Chicago.
I think I would like to go into modelling. Of course, I don't know how to do it, and wouldn't be any good at it if I did, so I'm going to employ someone to walk the catwalks on my behalf. It would still be me, of course.
