Quotes About Community

Because I'm in the media quite a lot now, everyone assumes that everything is fine. People forget I sleep on a mattress on the floor with my son in a house I share with five other people.

I'm Bob's son. He's my inspiration. What can I give back to the community?

Pennsylvania couldn't be prouder of our native son, Joe Biden from Scranton. No one knows us better than Joe.

I love having my son in my life. That's why it's more fathers in the hip-hop community, because they probably went through a fatherless childhood like I did.

Growing up in Orangeburg, I didn't know that I lived in the 'corridor of shame.' I was the son of a single mom who learned to read from comic books. My grandparents helped raise me.

I live up Laurel Canyon, and if I want to walk with my son, I have to drive to the park, which is so insane to me.

After I had my son, Max, I knew I wanted to get involved in causes that help children.

The great thing about being the son of Maya Angelou is that I had the good fortune to grow up around some of the greatest black artists, dancers, singers, musicians, and actors of our time.

The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.

I knew what could happen to my son if he was sent to the wrong school and got in with the wrong crowd.

As the mother of a son with disabilities, I try to keep an eye out for news that affects people in the large community of which he is a part.

Sondheim is New York.

Say you have a young black kid, and you come to see a Sondheim show. You love the material, but you look on stage, and you don't see anyone who looks like you. That puts a barrier between the audience and what they're trying to absorb.

When I perform in another country. The local people there sing along to my song in Korean.

The song 'Hymnostic' is kind of a gospel song, and that song is really fun to sing with as many people as possible. And anyone can sing it, you know?

I know that I come from a place of small-town roots and of humble beginnings and I try to keep those things in my songs - just stuff that I know people like me can relate to.

A songwriter should have friends who are similarly interested; should move about in the milieu of work he has chosen for himself.

I wanted to become a better songwriter, so it seemed like a no-brainer to move to Nashville, where some of the best writers in the world live.

Everybody in L.A. is a songwriter, producer, actor, creative. For some reason, you're supposed to go to a bar and all hang out and act like you like each other. There is a lot of fake stuff that goes on.

The first year I moved to Nashville, I started playing these songwriter nights with people like Nickel Creek, Duncan Sheik, and even Ryan Adams... That was the first place I really started playing music, and I had to really step up my game. Really quick. Or get kicked off the stage.

I usually hung out with my songwriter friends at their places or mine.

I did enjoy Nashville a lot of the time, because I made really good friends who were really good songwriters, and they would be a joy to hang out with.

In the Troubadour days, it was all those songwriters that I hung around with all the time, so I could get songs and find out what was going on. So we all knew each other, and we just carried each other's word around.

I know great songwriters. Fred Neil would come up when he was in L.A., we all used to hang out. He would sit there and sing, and we would just melt. I mean, we would go to his recording sessions.