“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.”

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.

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.

Black has depth.. you can go into it.. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.

My mom is a yoga instructor: 100% black with dreadlocks.

That Justice is a blind goddess Is a thing to which we black are wise: Her bandage hides two festering sores That once perhaps were eyes.

Nothing is ever black and white but I’m sick and tired of all the grey area.

I think every group of black guys should have at least one white guy in it.

Optimist – A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.

To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a grey area.

I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn’t ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.