Colour is not the issue in America; class is.
Category Archive: Gil Scott-Heron
My songs were always about the tone of voice rather than the words.
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 tour more than I need to, more than is good for you. But it’s my favorite part of music. I much prefer it to studio work.
I don’t mind being criticized. I enjoy being criticized personally, not by rumor.
The revolution that takes place in your head, nobody will ever see that.
I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.
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.
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.
Everything that’s bad for you catches on too quickly in America, because that’s the easiest thing to get people to invest in, the pursuits that are easy and destructive, the ones that bring out the least positive aspects of people.