“Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.”

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.

Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.

There is no harm in dreaming of becoming the world’s best player. It is all about trying to be the best. I will keep working hard to achieve it but it is within my capabilities.

If you want to achieve anything in this world, you have to get used to the idea that not everyone will like you.

If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it – then I can achieve it.

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.

Success is not achieved by winning all the time. Real success comes when we rise after we fall.

To achieve great things, we must first dream

I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.