The fact that over 50 per cent of the residents of Toronto are not from Canada, that is always a good thing, creatively, and for food especially. That is easily a city’s biggest strength, and it is Toronto’s unique strength.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

Our goal in the ’70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.

Millions of us, myself included, go back generations in this country, with ancestors who put in the painstaking work to become citizens. So we don’t like the notion that anyone might get a free pass to American citizenship.

I have the ’77 Million Paintings‘ running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I’ll look up from what I’m doing and I think, ‚God, I’ve never seen anything like that before!‘ And that’s a real thrill.

You have your ideology and I have mine.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

Apple has given me a platform to spread music. They’re giving us Latinos a chance to shine.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America – there’s the United States of America.

If you want to appeal to everyone, you can’t do a world tour and expect black people to show up at every date – when you’re in Australia, when you’re in Dubai, when you’re in Indonesia.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

Children are all foreigners.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

Unfortunately, the people of Louisiana are not racists.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

I don’t know a country in the world that doesn’t have borders and doesn’t want to know who is coming into their country.

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite.

Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

I think tolerance and acceptance and love is something that feeds every community.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

The diversity of India, of our civilization, is actually a thing of beauty, which is something we are extremely proud of.

Going to a therapist is not something you do when you’re growing up as a street kid in Toronto.

God gave me some weird, beautiful scent that makes men and women go crazy. People compare it to Carvel. It is a whale of a smell.

Racism is real in this country.

One of the things is challenging yourself to do a Rome show when everybody’s done a Rome show. To find some aspect of food culture or chef culture that people can look at in a new way.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.

All of us take offense to anyone who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America. And undocumented immigrants who desperately want to embrace those responsibilities see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

My upbringing in Canada made me the person I am. I will always be proud to be a Canadian.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

I try to see the good in everybody, and I don’t care who people are as long as they’re themselves, whatever that is.

The United States, to state the obvious, is greatly concerned by the startling number of unaccompanied minors that – children and teenagers who are making a very perilous journey through Central America to reach the United States.

America has absorbed people from around the world, and there is an Indian in every part of the world. This characterizes both the societies. Indians and Americans have co-existed in their natural temperament.

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It’s hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

Let’s be honest. Canada wasn’t ever cool.

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

I know that a large part of my fan base is gay. They’ve shown me love from the start. I mean in this industry, everyone from my glam people to my dancers are gay. You can’t be homophobic in this line of work – I’m a pop star!

We are trying to construct a more inclusive society. We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.

Let me state the obvious. Illegal immigration is illegal, duh.

I loved the fact that Obama is multi-racial. I thought that was terrific, as my wife is the same racial make-up.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

‚Royal Beatings‘ was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to ‚The New Yorker‘ in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. ‚The New Yorker‘ sent me nice notes, though – penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren’t terribly encouraging.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

I’ve been really fortunate to be able to do different kinds of films in different scales, different genres, different kinds of roles, and that is important to me.