“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren?t it doesn?t matter.”

I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. I don’t dare start thinking in the morning. If I thought thoughts in bed, Them thoughts would bust my head– So I don’t dare start thinking in the morning.

If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who’s coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.

This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.

The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain.

Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.

O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables.

I look at my own body With eyes no longer blind- And I see that my own hands can make The world that’s in my mind.

Looks like what drives me crazy Don’t have no effect on you– But I’m gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too.

LIBERTY! FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY! True anyhow no matter how many Liars use those words.

Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you – / Then, it will be true.

To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer – not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.

Reach Up Your Hand… and take a star.

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

Both of them were very good and kind – the one who went to church and the one who didn’t. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well.

I think there’s an artist hidden at the bottom of every single one of us.

Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.

I always knew I was gonna be an artist. I was very confident in that.

It is hard to separate the art from the artist.

My painting carries with it the message of pain.

When I say be creative I don’t mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.

I want to be an artist artist, a real artist. I don’t just want to do this for temporary money.

A true artist always looks to the new generations.