“When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.”

Life for my child is simple, and is good.

Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.

What, what am I to do with all of this life?

Exhaust the little moment soon it dies.

As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.

Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.

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.

Each body has its art.

With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.

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.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.

Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.

One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories?

It is with roses and locomotives that my poems are competing.

From the dark depths of my soul came an intense passion for prose.

You write poems or you are a poem. That is where you’ll shine.

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Writing wasn’t just a form of expression. It was a form of pathology by embarking on spoken word over and over and over again and reciting my poems.

Early on, if I was alone two-three nights in a row, I’d start writing poems about suicide.