As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.
The civil rights situation is like a pregnancy. It will get worse, I believe, before it gets better. What the usual pregnancy comes to is a decent baby. That is what we all hope will be the end product of this stress. It is customary, at the end of a pregnancy, to have for your pains a decent baby.
I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.
When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a “Hup two three four.” They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.
Writing is a delicious agony.
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.
Each body has its art...
Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.
First fight. Then fiddle.
We are each other’s magnitude and bond.
I don’t like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.
We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.