“I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.”

Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.

I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.

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.

It is brave to be involved.

Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don’t pay attention ’cause it probably has floated into somebody else’s head.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.

We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white.

There is a terrific apprehension among some people that blacks will take over the sport… It will create problems because their behavior, speech and dress is just a completely different culture.

The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns are less dangerous than its smiles and flatteries, and it is a difficult task to keep in the path of wisdom.

I have become convinced that we blacks spend too much time on the playing field and too little time in libraries.

I have become convinced that we blacks spend too much time on the playing field and too little time in libraries.

We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.

I was asked for years about being a Republican, probably because most black people are Democrats. My mother heard it once and called me and said ‘Charles, Republicans are for the rich people.’ And I said, ‘Mom, I’m rich.’

I think anybody who is racist is an idiot whether they are black or white.